Page 24 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 2. Pilot study
feedback, teachers therefore need to understand any affective factors that could be influencing how individual students interpret and filter the feedback and whether they are open to learning from the feedback.
To sum up: descriptive research has shown that teachers mainly give feedback at the level of speaking performance and have a limited feedback repertoire that does not always meet the learning needs of individual students. That is not surprising, since providing adaptive feedback on speaking skills in classes of 25-30 students (as is usual in the Dutch secondary education context) is complex. First of all, because of the transient nature of speech, the opportunity to give feedback passes quickly and how the student picks it up (the uptake) depends largely on his or her ability to remember exactly what was said, and on having the chance to improve it and practise it again. Furthermore, it is difficult to give feedback to 30 students, partly because the teacher has to realise other aims at the same time, such as motivating the students and keeping order in class. This means that any approach to adaptive feedback will only be successful if it not only aids the learning process, but is also an approach that teachers consider to be practical (Janssen, Westbroek & Doyle, 2015). With this in mind we designed a self- evaluation procedure for students and investigated whether this helped teachers to gear their feedback to the individual needs of students as they develop their speaking skills and whether it was practical for use in the regular classroom.
2.3 Core of the adaptive and practical feedback approach: self-evaluation by the student
From the discussion in the preceding section, it is clear that understanding the individual student is necessary for adaptive feedback: having insight into his or her speaking performance, understanding and noticing, self-regulation and affective factors (Figure 1). In order for the teacher to gain such insight, the feedback approach starts with a self-evaluation by the student. Moreover, it seems that self-evaluations can stimulate noticing in the student (Lappin-Fortin & Rye, 2014). Speaking correctly demands many cognitive processes in a short space of time (Levelt, 1989). Analysing a recording of their own speaking performance gives students time to think about their own speaking skills and how to improve them.
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