Page 116 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 5. Perspective of the teachers – professional development
teaching (Gass & Mackey, 2012; Lyster, Saito & Sato, 2013; Yoshida, 2008), due to practical constraints of the classroom ecology (Chapter 3; Corda, Koenraad & Visser, 2012; Fasoglio, 2015). An innovative teaching approach was developed for this purpose, the SpeakTeach method, which is modular and presented in, for teachers, recognizable building blocks (see chapter 3). The core of the SpeakTeach method consists of three procedures. Procedure 1: the students listen to a recording of their speaking performance, evaluate their own performance and make a plan for improvement, and indicate their preference for working method and whether they need assistance from the teacher. This self-evaluation with plan provides insight into learning needs to both teachers and students and enables adjustment and alignment of learning activities. Procedure 2: the teacher provides activities to improve the speaking performance and chooses how to steer the working method on the basis of the self-evaluation (alternatively but less commonly the students may do this themselves). Procedure 3: the teacher adjusts feedback based on the students’ self-evaluations (alternatively but less commonly feedback may be provided by peers). Multiple variations on the core (the three procedures) are possible which generate versions which differ in the degree of alignment in the lessons, in the degree of learner autonomy, and in the degree of differentiation of activities and adaptive feedback. The SpeakTeach method was made adaptive to students by starting with a self-evaluation by the learner and attuning the student’s learning route to that and the professional development trajectory was made adaptive to teachers in a similar way.
5.4.2 Participants
The study was conducted among the same foreign language teachers of the experimental group who applied the SpeakTeach method in their teaching (see chapter 3). It was not necessary to have a homogenous group of teachers with similar teaching practices. Since the precise purpose of the study was to develop an adaptive professional development trajectory which would enable teachers to expand their teaching repertoire with an innovative teaching approach that would fit in with their practices, a heterogeneous group of teachers was desirable. Complete datasets were available from 11 foreign language teachers. Data from each teacher about his/her regular teaching and data about a maximum of three SpeakTeach lesson series were selected from these datasets for the present study.
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