Page 152 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 6. General conclusions and discussion
A limitation of the study is that it focused on self-regulation by a heterogeneous group of secondary school students. Further research should be carried out in order to identify any differences in terms of year and language. It might be that lower level students differ from higher classes in meta-cognitive skills and therefore differ in, for instance, degree of independence and need for assistance during the self-evaluation-procedure.
One of the concrete design principles to facilitate the self-regulatory process in the adaptive teaching approach was students’ self-evaluation of their own recorded speaking performance. A theoretical contribution of this study is that it approaches self-evaluation differently than many other studies. Much research on students’ self-assessment has questioned the accuracy of self-assessments. Low correlations have been frequently found between students’ self-assessments and tests or other measures considered to be valid and reliable (Phoener, 2012: 611; Ross, 1998). In contrast, this study did not focus on the accuracy of students’ assessments, but on students’ perceived needs during a procedure which aimed at learning to self-regulate their own speaking skills. The self-evaluation procedure in this study therefore had a different focus from the more common self-assessments in a number of respects.
First, the self-evaluation addressed a specific speaking performance and not the student’s speaking skills in general.
Second, in contrast to much previous research (e.g. Brantmeier, Vanderplank & Strubbe, 2012; Phoener, 2012; Ross, 1998), the self-evaluation did not use external standards, but a self-evaluation instrument containing non-normative criteria to get the students to reflect on various aspects of their speaking performance (message, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, fluency) and on areas for improvement and positive points using their own internal standards. On the one hand, the intention was to get students to think about their own performance, their own goals, what was needed and how to attain new goals (instead of ranking their performance to an external standard). On the other hand, these students’ subjective evaluations provided insights for teachers about their current level and degree of self-regulation.
Third, many existing approaches to the use of self-assessment focus only on diagnosis of performance, whereas in this procedure students also produced a plan for improvement and stated what help they needed. Information for the teacher to adapt their teaching was therefore not only based on students’ diagnoses of their speaking performance as in other
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