Page 30 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 2. Pilot study
improve fluency. After viewing the self-evaluation (phase 3), the teacher did not change this concrete point for improvement but added further feedback.
First of all, she responded on affective factors. The teacher indicated that the student was well-motivated, a perfectionist, and she found confirmation for this view in the student’s focus on mistakes and the many plans for improvement in her self-evaluation. The teacher agreed with the student’s analysis of her faults with regard to vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and fluency, but did not agree that the student should spend more time on grammar and learning lists of words. In response to seeing the student’s focus on grammar and words in the self-evaluation, the teacher resolved to talk to the student about the importance of keeping the communication flowing rather than thinking about every word. Because of this the teacher also wanted to give feedback at the regulatory level. The teacher agreed with Natasja’s suggestions that she should do pronunciation exercises, think about what she wants to say in advance and practise the dialogue a couple of times. In this sense the self-evaluation had prompted the teacher to expand her improvement plan for the student.
Table 2.4 shows that student Nadine was less specific in her evaluation of her positive points and errors. She simply stated whether an aspect of language was good or not good. In contrast, her plan for improvement was specific and detailed. The reason for this was that the self-evaluation form provided scaffolds for writing plans (see Appendix I). The student stated that she needed help from the teacher with grammar rules. The vagueness in her evaluation and the request for help may stem from a lack of the metacognitive and linguistic knowledge she would need to be more specific, as Dlaska & Krekeler (2003) also found in a study in which students found it difficult to identify specific pronunciation problems without help from the teacher. It could be that Nadine still needed a lot of external feedback. Nadine was inconsistent in her self-evaluation. Even though she thought that she was good at getting her message across, she still formulated two plans on communicating the message. She made no plan for pronunciation, even though she had identified this as a weakness, while she did have a plan to improve her fluency, the area that she was satisfied with.
The self-evaluation gave the teacher some insight into these inconsistencies and she was surprised by them. However, it was unclear from the interview whether the teacher intended to do anything about these inconsistencies. The teacher’s initial feedback mainly consisted of advice to learn and keep up with words and grammar. New information for the
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