Page 153 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

formative uses (e.g. Black & Wiliam, 1998; Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006), but also on students’ improvement plans. The self-evaluation by the student was not just an instrument for diagnosis in this study, it was part of a whole evaluation procedure containing a learning pathway to improve the initial speaking performance. The aim of using self-evaluation with improvement plan in the adaptive approach was not only to provide information for the teacher to tailor their teaching, but to stimulate the students themselves to design and implement their own learning pathways in an iterative learning process.
The results in chapter 4 showed that students did indeed ask for less assistance from the teacher in later cycles and that the focus in diagnoses and plans changed. A limitation of the study was that the data were based on the estimates of what the students themselves thought they needed. It cannot therefore be concluded that the changes in learning needs that we found mean that the students had learned to assess themselves better and make better plans. As discussed in chapter 4, much research has shown that foreign language learners find it difficult to assess themselves (Blanche, 1988; Poehner, 2012; Ross, 1998). Further research should therefore follow students for a longer period of time and compare their perceptions with external standards in order to investigate how much progress they make in self-assessing their speaking performances. In addition, we did not measure how much the students’ speaking skills had actually improved. Further research should aim to show whether, over time, the self-evaluation procedure does lead to students speaking better in the foreign language than students who do not follow the self-evaluation procedure.
In addition to student’s self-evaluation, adaptive feedback was one of the design principles of the adaptive and practical teaching approach. With regard to the theoretical contribution in the field of feedback, this study focused on how feedback and activities can be tailored in complex classroom settings. In accordance with socio-cultural approaches, this study assumed that feedback should be tailored to the development of the students (Lantolf, Thorne & Poehner, 2015; Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994; Poehner & Lantolf, 2005). Socio-cultural studies often take place outside the classroom in one-to-one situations (e.g. Poehner, 2012). However, this study aimed at an adaptive approach in regular classroom situations. In order to provide adaptive feedback in classroom settings, teachers need to use a broad repertoire of feedback types and strategies to respond to their student’s individual needs and the instructional context (Lyster, Saito & Sato 2013). For this reason, the intervention in this study had a broader scope than much research on feedback in the field of second language
149
151
6