Page 158 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 6. General conclusions and discussion
adds a fifth pedagogy, namely: creating adaptive learning routes by means of modularity and
self-evaluation in order to support teachers to implement an innovative teaching approach.
6.5 Practical implications
Since we opted for design research which targets the development of solutions to a practical educational problem as well as theoretical development, the research inherently has practical implications. The main research question asked for design principles for an adaptive approach that is practical for teachers. The practicality for teachers was tested in this study (chapter 3). The results showed that teachers and students could apply the design principles of the adaptive teaching approach, the SpeakTeach method, and that teachers intended to continue to use all or parts of the teaching approach. In addition, although it was not part of the scope of the current research and data have not been collected, it can be mentioned that already after the publication of the first articles, several teachers indicated that they were inspired and used the design principles of the SpeakTeach method in their practice (see epilogue). That suggests that teachers are keen and able to apply the approach in their practice.
Important practical implications of the application of the SpeakTeach method in teaching are that it provides teachers with opportunities to have more information about the learning needs of their students through the self-evaluations and this enables them to tailor their feedback to the students making it less ad hoc. The adaptive teaching approach also provides students with the opportunity to improve their speaking performance and do the speaking activity again. No matter how much time a teacher allows to carry out a SpeakTeach round (a 10-minute session, an entire lesson or several lessons), inherent in the approach is that after the speaking activity an improvement activity is done and then the speaking activity is repeated. The adaptive approach means that speaking tasks are not isolated tasks in a lesson or series of lessons, as it creates alignment between learning objective, speaking activity and other learning activities. As a result, speaking skills gain a more prominent position in lesson series. There is more focus on speaking skills, as teachers of the experimental group reported (see chapter 3). An important result was that the adaptive teaching approach provided students with opportunities to be more active while practising speaking foreign languages, because the approach requires all students to speak, relisten, evaluate, improve and repeat. Since the approach consists of existing lesson segments, other lesson content and skills such as reading, listening, grammar and vocabulary are integrated in an aligned set of learning
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