Page 84 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 4. Perspective of the students - adaptivity
c. Let students indicate their need for assistance
Let learners indicate whether they want to work autonomously, with a peer, or whether they need assistance from the teacher. Regulating the degree of autonomy by indicating the kind of support they need gives control to learners.
2. Provide adaptive activities for improvement and 3. Provide adaptive feedback
Teachers make inferences about what their students know and can do and adapt their feedback and instruction based on this knowledge (Bennett, 2011). In regular teaching, those inferences about the learners’ speaking skills are based on what teachers hear and know from previous experiences in the classroom. The self-evaluation procedure gives teachers additional information provided by the students’ diagnoses, plans for improvement and desired working format or requests for help. Teachers can scan the evaluations for discrepancies with their own inferences, tailor their feedback and propose learning activities aligned with learners’ current level and degree of self- regulation (Sadler, 1998). If students are already independent learners, they can select and arrange improvement activities themselves.
1-3. After executing the plan for improvement, let the students redo the same or a similar speaking activity with self-evaluation
Give students the chance to repeat the same (or similar) speaking activity to find out whether they have progressed and to put into practice what they have learned. Task repetition can help learners to advance (Bygate, 2001; Goh & Burns, 2012; Goh, 2017). Then a new cycle of monitoring and improving can begin.
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