Page 70 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 3. Perspective of the teachers - practicality
opportunity to offer adaptive feedback and support. Furthermore, the students are able to work with more focus using the feedback and learning activities they have been given on improving the same final or other speaking activity that will be evaluated again. This approach takes existing learning activities from regular teaching to create a coherent body of learning activities around a speaking goal thereby increasing alignment in the lessons. In short, the additional self-evaluation component in the SpeakTeach approach has three functions: to improve capacity to learn; to facilitate tailored teaching; and a practical, organisational function, which is that the learning process proceeds while more time is created for adaptive teaching.
Limitations of this research were the duration and scale of its implementation. A follow-up study with more participants over a longer period of time is to be recommended to enable the results to be generalised. Moreover, this study was based on self-reporting by teachers. This was because we were specifically interested in teachers’ perception of the practicality of the approach and what factors they considered when applying the design principles in their lessons. A further study could also observe teachers’ behaviour to find out how they implemented the adaptive teaching method in their lessons.
This research looked at implementation from the teacher’s perspective, the student’s perspective was not included. In a follow-up study the emphasis will be on the students: to what extent do they experience this approach as meeting their specific learning needs? (See chapter 4).
Despite the limitations of this study, we feel able to cautiously recommend this teaching approach for other subjects. First of all, its flexibility and the way the teaching method is made practical by means of the steps of the Bridging Model could be adopted for other curriculum reforms. In addition, the way it ensures that feedback and learning activities can be tailored to meet students’ needs, namely through an iterative learning process of self- evaluations followed by feedback and tailored improvement activities, could also be applied to different subjects as well as to other components of the modern foreign languages curriculum such as listening skills.
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