Page 74 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 4. Perspective of the students - adaptivity
was used in several cycles by students to create an iterative learning process of monitoring and improving their own speaking skills. In this chapter we focus on the question of whether our self-evaluation procedure could be an adaptive resource for secondary school students to learn to improve their speaking skills in foreign languages through self-regulation. First, we examine in further detail what was needed to promote self-regulation in speaking skills. We needed to know this in order to derive design principles for the teaching practice. Then we propose a concrete self-evaluation procedure for speaking skills on the basis of these design principles and investigate the extent to which changes occurred in the process of student self- regulation in improving their speaking skills after four iterations of the self-evaluation procedure. We also examine to what extent secondary school students perceived the self- evaluation procedure as motivating and the support they received as adaptive. With this study we hope to contribute to the goal of guiding students to become autonomous learners in learning to speak foreign languages and to provide concrete design principles to support this learning process adaptively.
4.2 Theoretical framework
4.2.1 Self-regulation as a feedback loop
Improving speaking skills can be seen as a goal-directed process that runs through a feedback loop. The core construct of this feedback loop is the reduction of the discrepancy between the learner’s perceived current speaking performance and some desired level of performance or goal. This sets off an iterative process. Carver and Scheier (1998) proposed a general feedback loop as a model of self-regulation which we applied to self-regulation in speaking skills (Figure 8, based on Lord, Diefendorff, Schmidt & Hall, 2010: 546; Carver & Scheier, 1998; and Powers, 1973). This model comprises the components of the process of self-regulation and their interrelationships. An autonomous learner goes through all components independently, “[...] taking responsibility for the objectives of learning, self-monitoring, self-assessing, and taking an active role in learning” (Lee, 1998).
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