Page 28 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 2. Pilot study
motivation or other variables, because we were particularly interested in how teachers deal with all those different student characteristics. We did opt to select students from the final 2 years of secondary school who were working with materials at level B1, because we assumed that at the more senior levels students’ speaking performances would be more diverse as they have more knowledge of the foreign language and more experience with speaking than beginners. They would therefore have more opportunities to express the same message in different ways, making it more complex for the teachers to respond. We opted to work with experienced teachers, because we assumed that they would have experience in assessing their students’ speaking skills and would therefore be able to evaluate the added value offered by the self-evaluation procedure.
We analysed the self-evaluation forms (see Appendix I) completed by the 17 selected students and described how the students evaluated their own work. The answers were entered into a matrix under the headings: positive points, errors, plans for improvement and help needed. We then categorised these under the parameters: message, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and fluency. The researcher (the author) interpreted how concrete the students’ evaluations were, their consistency and discrepancies between the positive points, errors, plans for improvement and help needed.
Open structured interviews were held with the three teachers which each lasted for approximately 2 1⁄2 hours. There were three phases to each interview in which the teachers were asked about positive points, errors, plans for improvement and help needed with respect to each selected student and about the feedback they proposed to give.
In the first phase, they were asked to evaluate the student based on their own knowledge of him or her. We asked them to do this because we wanted to find out what ideas the teachers already held about their students’ achievements and learning needs. The fact is that teachers use these ideas about what students are capable of to adapt their teaching and they are based on the many previous experiences that the teacher has had with the student in all kinds of situations (Bennett, 2011).
In the second phase, the students’ recorded dialogues were played to the teachers, who were then asked if they wanted to change anything or add to their evaluations. This was done to allow conclusions to be drawn later about whether it was necessary to listen to each student’s recording (as this takes a lot of time and therefore does not meet the practicality criterion).
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