Flipped classroom in teaching english as a foreign Language to adult learners

Abstract

Despite being a relatively novel concept, Flipped Classroom has already gathered masses of followers from among the ranks of teachers, as well as attracted attention among the educational scientists all over the world. The effects of Flipped Classroom have been tested across the spectrum of school subjects and age groups in general, as well as for the uses for teaching the English language in particular. However, as far as I am aware a study comparing Flipped Classroom to non-flipped active-learning based teaching of the English language was missing and thus that is what I set out to investigate. Building upon the foundations of the pilot study that I conducted in 2016 at the University of Granada (Spain), I 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 myself 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. Despite the positive results of here-presented study, much remains to be investigated about the effects of Flipped Classroom strategy in comparison to activelearning strategy. A variety of different learner characteristics, different types of ELT curriculum upon which a language class may be built, the size of participant group as well as the length of the intervention period, cultural and age variables, all of those and more may present avenues for future research. Based on my study I feel confident to conclude that Flipped Classroom is beneficial for teaching and learning the English language. Seeing as, globally, we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic that largely forced us into quick adoption of distance learning, I believe now is the high time for the adoption of this type of teaching by the wider educational community as well.