Page 50 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 3. Perspective of the teachers - practicality
type and number of improvement activities, the order of doing things and the types of work
may be determined by the teacher or the student.
Design principle 3: Provide adaptive feedback
The self-evaluation, the improvement plan and in some cases the recording give teachers information that enables them to tailor their feedback to the learning processes of individual students. On that basis, in addition to feedback on aspects of speaking skills (such as getting the message across, vocabulary, grammar, fluency and pronunciation), teachers can also give feedback on the students’ comprehension, capacity for noticing and regulative skills as well as affective factors (motivation effort, fear of speaking, etc.) (see Figure 1, Chapter 2). Adaptive feedback need not mean that feedback is only given individually. Group feedback is also possible, for example if a large group has the same need. Focus, feedback techniques, steering and grouping can be adapted depending on the learning needs that emerge from the self- evaluations, but also on the available time and what is possible.
Alignment
After the students have been given the opportunity to improve their speaking performance (with principles 2 and 3), they do the same speaking activity again or a similar one and evaluate whether their performance has improved (design principle 1 again, see Figure 5), after which they may be given further improvement activities or adaptive feedback. This principle can generate an iterative learning process, with alignment between learning objective, speaking activity and other learning activities. Alignment or the whole of the connected learning activities designed to achieve the speaking objective can be small or large, depending on where the self-evaluations are slotted into the lesson series. The degree of alignment varies depending on the design options chosen. The following design choices show an increasing degree of alignment: 1) the self-evaluation is used for a single random speaking activity in a series of lessons followed by improvement activities; 2) it is used with an easy (guided) speaking activity at the start of a series of lessons and with the final (free) speaking activity at the end of the series; 3) the final speaking activity with the self-evaluation is done right at the beginning of a series of lessons, after which all the activities in the series are planned to improve the final speaking activity.
48
47