Flipped Instruction for Language Learning

Background

Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams are credited with ground-breaking the concept of flipped instruction (2012). These two chemistry high school teachers began with the notion of using technology to help their high school students who missed courses or some part of the lecture due to extra-curricular high school athletic and other activities. They used screencasts of recorded lectures, homework, slide presentations, and chemistry demonstrations. Their investment in keeping their students interested in their courses ended up with two astonishing results. The first was that students began interacting more in class because they did not worry about losing class time. The second was that students who were having problems keeping up with the course fared better because of the added use of video and extra technological engagement available to them. Bergmann and Sams also wrote the book titled Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. Flipped instruction has been utilized by other educators using some of elements in the flipped instruction model to provide successful personalized experiences using flipped learning. However, there is limited research on flipped instruction effectiveness in the ESL classroom per se.

The idea of flipped instruction has other conceptual distinctions that incorporate the idea of decreasing classroom lecturing for a more hands-on approach to learning. Eric Mazur, a Harvard Physics professor interested on increasing student knowledge of physics, coined the term “peer instruction” in 1991. His book entitled Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual was published in 1997. In it he gives instructional strategies that moved classroom instruction from sheer lecturing to class learning while he used coaching strategies. Although not termed flipped instruction, peer instruction has been researched and proven to be an effective tool toward providing student self-learning and teaching within inverted classroom instruction.