Which Roles does Video play in Flipped Language Classrooms?
Résumé
“Flipped classroom” was not long ago considered as a buzzword (Brame, 2013, Bishop & Verleger, 2013). Today, it has become a widespread instructional strategy in Europe and around the globe. Even ministries put it to the fore as an example of pedagogical innovation to be followed (e.g. French ministry for Education, 2017).
Video has a particular status in the flipped classroom. Some authors consider the video lecture before class as constitutive of its definition (Bishop & Verleger, 2013) while others adopt a broader view which encompasses multiple possible activities and types of materials during the out-of-class phase (Lage, Platt & Treglia 2000; Bergmann & Sams 2012; Schäfer 2012; Brame 2013, Lebrun & Lecoq 2015). As teaching and learning materials in the language classroom, video, together with movie and TV, represent a distinct field of research that was particularly fertile in the 80s and 90s of the last century (Willis 1983, Lancien 1986, Schwerdtfeger 1989, Compte 1993) and that has taken newer directions with the widening access to digital technology and data transfer, such as L2 learners creating videos (see Masats et al., 2009), or the use of video in autonomous and in distance learning settings (see Vanderplank, 2010). To our knowledge, though, no research has yet been conducted on video use in the flipped language classroom.
Therefore, our study will focus on the place and role of video in the flipped language classroom. We will examine recent descriptions of such flipped learning settings through the lens of Willis’ framework of six possible roles for video use (Willis, 1983, reprised by Goldstein & Driver, 2015), namely model & cue, target, transfer & reinforcement, illustrator of message and discourse structure, source of information, and stimulus. The categories of roles will be discussed with regard to these settings, and the framework modified in order to better embrace actual flipped practices. Identifying the roles video plays in these contexts also implies taking a deeper look at the integration of videos through out-of-class tasks and in-class tasks, and how both types of tasks interrelate.
Our corpus consists of 3 sets of learning setting descriptions for flipped language classroom lessons or sequences (N of described lessons / sequences ≈ 50). All of these were written and posted by L2 teachers themselves, the first two sets as part of a Mooc on flipped classrooms at secondary school level, run by a national public editor for learning and teaching materials and conducted in 2015 and again in 2016; the third set as examples of flipped classrooms on an L2 portal of the French ministry of education, from June 2015 up to now.