Page 151 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Furthermore, teachers’ self-evaluations enable tailoring of a professional development trajectory to their needs as it provides information for both the teachers themselves and the facilitator of the professional development trajectory on what the teachers do, experience, wish to achieve and what tailored input and activities are needed.
Hence, the principle of self-evaluation was needed on two levels in this teaching approach: on the level of the students (self-evaluation by the students of their own speaking performance) as a design principle to make the teaching approach adaptive for the students; and on the level of the teachers (self-evaluation by the teachers of their own teaching practice) as a design principle to make the teaching approach practical for the teachers and the professional development trajectory adaptive for the teachers.
6.4 Theoretical implications, limitations and directions for future research
The aim of the research in this dissertation was to design and evaluate a practical adaptive teaching approach for self-regulated learning of speaking skills. In this section theoretical implications, limitations and directions for future research will be discussed first from the perspective of students and then from the perspective of teachers.
6.4.1 Theoretical implications for research on students
This study aimed at self-regulation. As in socio-cultural studies, a cyclical self-regulatory process is assumed. In previous research, the case has also been made for an iterative learning process in which learners gradually become more independent in self-regulating (e.g. Little et al., 2017). Other researchers have proposed a cycle of reflection and task-repetition in order to improve speaking skills (Goh & Burns, 2012; Goh, 2017). This study contributes to the development of knowledge about guiding students to become autonomous learners in learning to speak foreign languages, because it adds concrete design principles intended to facilitate such an iterative learning process, namely: adding students’ self-evaluation of a recording of their own speaking performance, providing adaptive feedback and providing activities for improvement. The results in chapter 4 showed that students could actually go through this process of self-regulation more independently and that the focus in their evaluations and plans changed.
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