Encouraging student autonomy in EFL and ESP speaking practice: flip and anchor
| Autor | Karen Jacob/Yolanda Joy Calvo Benzies |
| Cargo del Autor | University of the Balearic Islands/University of the Balearic Islands |
| Páginas | 406-434 |
挑腸釆般頒腸挑
CAPÍTULO 22
ENCOURAGING STUDENT AUTONOMY IN EFL
AND ESP SPEAKING PRACTICE: FLIP AND ANCHOR
KAREN JACOB
University of the Balearic Islands
YOLANDA JOY CALVO BENZIES
University of the Balearic Islands
1. INTRODUCTION88
It is a common complaint that spoken skills have traditionally received
less attention in foreign language (FL) classes in Spain in comparison to
written skills, vocabulary, or grammar (Alonso, 2014; Calvo, 2016;
Hornero et al., 2013). Consequently, many Spanish learners of English
suffer from anxiety and de-motivation due to a lack of confidence when
speaking the foreign language (Horwitz et al., 1986; Martínez-Asís,
2004).
Far from improving this debilitating situation, the COVID-19 pandemic
has hindered the accomplishment of spoken tasks in class even more. In
our particular case, language teachers at the University of the Balearic
Islands (UIB) faced three different scenarios during the pandemic.
Firstly, when the teaching was 100% online, our students rarely
switched on their cameras or volunteered to speak in English on the
online platform being used. Furthermore, when we divided our students
into groups on Zoom or BBCollaborate to practise speaking, it was dif-
ficult to control whether they were talking in English or using their na-
tive language(s), namely Spanish and/or Catalan (the Majorcan variety).
88 This study is part of a teaching innovation project called Desarrollo de las competencias en
expresión oral y vocabulario específico en inglés a través de la plataforma Anchor, which is
funded by the Institut de Recerca i Innovació Educativa (IRIE, UIB; Grant PID212252).
挑腸釆般飯腸挑
Secondly, in hybrid teaching methodologies—which entailed approxi-
mately half of the students following the class online and the rest of them
receiving traditional face-to-face lessons on campus—, devoting time to
speaking became even more time-consuming as we had to constantly re-
peat what the in-class students said since the online learners could not
hear them; furthermore, the students and/or ourselves sometimes suf-
fered technical problems causing delays. Finally, on return to the class-
room for an exclusive face-to-face teaching methodology, we had to fol-
low some social measures which made it difficult for the students to form
groups to do speaking tasks and for the teacher to move around the class-
room to offer personalised feedback and help as in pre-pandemic times.
One direct consequence was the necessity to find alternative ways of
motivating FL students to autonomously enhance their speaking skills
outside their university lessons; in other words, we needed to encourage
learners to use different tools which could help them develop their spo-
ken skills without the direct help of a teacher.
We should also consider that today’s students are digitally literate,
which implies the necessity to incorporate digital teaching methodolo-
gies into our classes in order to maintain students’ interest in the learning
process (Budiarta et al., 2020). We are no longer teaching millennials
(also referred to as digital natives—cf. Prensky, 2001), but we are teach-
ing generation Z (Gen Z)—the generation of people marked by the In-
ternet and this has affected the way they receive and obtain information
(Harmanto, 2013).
Due to the lack of oral practice contexts during the Covid-19 pandemic,
teachers had to be creative and innovative when providing speaking op-
portunities for their students as acknowledged by the rise in academic
articles that suggest using online communication tools such as podcasts
or video-blogging to enhance speaking (see Keddie, 2014). In addition,
some academics believe that these tools lower students’ levels of anxiety
in the oral skill (Mango, 2021; Muslimin et al., 2022; Tuyet & Khang,
2020). This is important since one of the principal problems that ham-
pers oral production is frequently due to anxiety.
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