Innovation in Language Learning

Flipped Classroom is a teaching strategy attempting to bring the teaching process on par with the needs of 21st century. The main feature of Flipped classroom is the exchange of the lecture and what is typically homework, using pre-recorded lectures that students engage with prior to coming to class where the time is focused on activities promoting meaningful activities of the pre-learned theory. Building upon the foundations of the pilot study conducted in 2016 at the University of Granada (Spain), we set up an experiment in which 36 undergraduate students from the University of Trnava, Slovakia, underwent intervention in the form of Flipped Classroom strategy during a compulsory course of the English language. The study had a semi-experimental pre-test/post-test design and, to closer reflect the everyday reality of a typical teacher, the pre-class materials were not created by us but instead selected from the databases of YouTube. The results show that Flipped Classroom had a statistically significant positive effect on the participants' English language proficiency in general, as well as on their listening, grammatical, and communicative proficiency in particular. In terms of listening skills, Flipped Classroom was also found to have more positive effects than the non-flipped active-learning based teaching strategy used in to control group, and the difference was statistically significant. For the other investigated language skills, as well as overall English language proficiency, Flipped Classroom was also found to have yielded more positive results than active learning strategy, however, the difference between the two was not statistically significant. The participants of the experiment mostly reported highly positive views of their experience, stressing in particular the positive effects of flipped teaching on their communicative ability. 

References

[1] Ahmad, S. Z. (2016). The Flipped Classroom Model to Develop Egyptian EFL Students' Listening Comprehension. English Language Teaching, 9(9), 166-178.

[2] Alsowat, H. (2016). An EFL flipped classroom teaching model: Effects on English language higher-order thinking skills, student engagement and satisfaction. Journal of Education and Practice, 7(9), 108-121.

[3] Bergmann, J., Sams, A. (2012). Flip your classroom: Reach every student in every class every day. International society for technology in education.

[4] Birová, L. (2019). Flipped classroom and its use in teaching English as a foreign language. Publicaciones, 49(5), 93-112.

[5] Brown, A. F. (2018). Implementing the Flipped Classroom: Challenges and Strategies. In Innovations in Flipping the Language Classroom (pp. 11-21). Springer, Singapore.

[6] Niemi, H. (2002). Active learning—a cultural change needed in teacher education and schools. Teaching and teacher education, 18(7), 763-780.