Aim. Research to date acknowledges the learning, instructional and assessment advantages of self-assessment used in different fields of study in higher education contexts, yet little known research has focused on its use for learning and raising learner awareness while studying English for Specific Purposes (ESP). To this end, the present small-scale study examines the use of self-assessment of philology students’ ESP oral performance at a university in Lithuania. Method. The data for this research was collected from undergraduate students’ written reports on their project presentations on the chosen ESP topics. To analyse the data, qualitative methodology of inductive content analysis was used. Results. The study resulted in the identification of five major dimensions covering problem areas in the students’ ESP oral performance. The findings indicate that self-assessment enabled the students not only to identify some gaps and difficulties in their ESP oral performance that call for action but also to establish the reasons which caused them, foresee how the gaps can be closed or the difficulties coped with. Furthermore, it allowed the students to make decisions that reached far beyond the self-assessment task. The results also demonstrate that self-assessment raised the students’ awareness of themselves as learners by giving them direction on how to perform better in the future. Conclusion. Self-assessment, as used in the present research, proves to be a valuable tool both for the students of ESP and their teachers as it reveals areas in the students’ performance that call for improvement, which enables ESP teachers to support their students to achieve better results in the future.
The studies devoted to the so-called good language learners that emerged in the 1970s (Rubin 1975) reveal that efficient learners fall back on an abundant and highly individualised array of techniques and strategic behaviours related to and employed while learning. The well-known taxonomies by Oxford (1990) and O’Malley and Chamot (1990) gave rise to analyses and investigations in the field of learner autonomy and self-development, also in pronunciation learning/teaching. As has been corroborated by empirical studies (Oxford 2001a; Oxford 2001b; Chamot, 2004) strategy training contributes to the increase in overall proficiency as well as to a number of invaluable benefits such as enhanced motivation, greater self-efficacy, anxiety reduction and more positive attitudes. Although studies dedicated to the relationship between learning strategies and pronunciation are still in their infancy, there are a number of investigations that set the directions for further research and development (Peterson 2000; Pawlak 2008; Pawlak and Oxford 2018). The paper presents results of a pilot study conducted in a secondary school that aimed at observing how learners develop pronunciation strategies as a result of regular pronunciation input and feedback from the teacher. It addresses a tentative assumption that explicit pronunciation training may contribute to the enhanced strategy use and consequently to better oral performance. Detecting and naming the strategies employed by the learners as well as selecting the most effective ones for more explicit application aided and boosted the learners’ awareness and confidence, which was confirmed by data obtained from questionnaires and from participant observation.
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