Page 69 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

practice, because it was based on the Bridging Model which enables teachers to recombine existing building blocks from their regular teaching practice. Moreover, the design principles of the teaching method allowed the teachers to tailor the method to suit their own teaching style and practices; there was no prescribed SpeakTeach method but opportunities to use the core of the approach in a variety of ways. The results show that the teachers made full use of those opportunities for variation in order to tailor their teaching to their students. They used the three design principles to produce many different variants of SpeakTeach lessons. It is striking in this regard that many chose to implement the design principles to the maximum mainly with adaptive considerations in mind. This resulted in many series of lessons that were structured with the final speaking activity and the self-evaluation at the beginning (almost two thirds), leading to maximum alignment of speaking and learning activities in order to achieve the final speaking aim. It is also striking that many teachers opted for student-led lessons (almost two thirds) and fully adaptive feedback was given in more than half of the lesson series.
New adaptations of the teaching approach were found which retained the essence of SpeakTeach and which were in line with its aims. The self-evaluation, for example, was done with each speaking activity in the lesson series in some cases in order to provide more insight into the learning process; in another series the teacher allowed the students to decide for themselves on which speaking activity they would do the self-evaluation, judging that that they were ready for that degree of self-regulation; and in yet another series peer feedback was used to increase student autonomy.
A new ingredient was added to the Bridging Model in this research to facilitate even more adaptation to meet students’ needs and adaptation of existing teaching practices: this was the addition of student self-evaluation with a plan for improvement. A self-evaluation is not only valuable for the student’s learning process (Lappin-Fortin et al., 2014; Poehner, 2012), it can also be used as a diagnostic tool to help teachers tailor their teaching (cf. contingent teaching, Van de Pol et al, 2011). Teachers do adapt feedback and learning activities in their regular teaching, but they do this based on what they hear and see from the students. A large part of the lesson is not tailored because the teacher cannot be everywhere at once and has to respond on the spot. Self-evaluations can give teachers deeper insight into the learning processes of all of their students as they continue to study and learn, giving teachers the
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