The Use of Different Students` Interactions Using a Flipped Approach to Enhance

Productive Skills.

El Uso de diferentes Interacciones entre Estudiantes Empleando un Método a la Inversa

para Promover las Habilidades de Producción Lingüísticas.

Luis Fernando López Davila.

Introduction

The are some big concerns among English teachers related to the fact of encouraging students

to work actively and interact one another in the classes. Consequently, new solutions to this

academic dilemma have emerged, the flipped approach or flipped lesson is aimed to provoke

both students’ interactions to solve engaging tasks (games) in the classroom and to strengthen

their productive skills, these skills are the innate ability to speak every human being was

borned with as well as writing that is a learned artifact. Scholars have explained that lessons

with a flipped approach are more likely to engage students to develop their interactional skills

since students work together with a better attitude and motivation for the language classes

because of the activities. For example,

Tomczyk, Solomon, Puentes, Sanchez-Castillo, Muñoz, Simsek, Akyar, Yaşar, Demirhan,

(2018) state that in a FL instructional model, the teachers switch the learning activities that

traditionally happened in the classrooms. Schultz et al (2014) argue that most students had a

favorable perception about the flipped classroom noting the ability to pause, rewind, and

review lectures, as well as increased individual and pair learning. McKnight, Arfstrom,

McKnight (2013) conclude that Flipped Learning focuses on meeting individual student

learning needs. In general, it appears that a flipped lesson is a determined factor to keep

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students eager to take an active role in their learning process and reduce their affective filter

factor and work with their classmates using the language as a mean to solve the cognitive

demanding tasks this approach presents.

In this paper I will address how a flipped lesson enhances and promotes not only the

students’ interactions in the class but also their productive skills. For this purpose, I will

provide a comprehensive explanation of the context, and the participants of teaching practice.

Furthermore, this paper will present two positive outcomes of using a flipped lesson to

promote students’ interactions and their productive skills using games, and the interpretations

of why these outcomes happened. Finally, I will present conclusions and recommendations

to take into consideration to execute this teaching practice in other contexts.

Methodology
The teaching practice of this paper took place in a public university (Caldas

University) in Manizales, Caldas, Colombia. This is a new program and it is an agreement

the university has with Purdue university in Boston, USA. The aim of the program is to teach

English to 20 undergraduate students from rural areas who are taking degrees related to

Agriculture and Agronomy. These students will have the opportunity of taking one semester

of their programs in the USA. The participants of this teaching practice were university

students whose ages ranged between nineteen and twenty-five years old; 10 of them are males

and 10 are females. My teaching practice consisted of nine stages in which students learned

and practiced the correct use of simple past to talk about past experiences. The stages

incorporated meaningful engaging games to promote students to speak more fluently, write,

and work together in order to overcome the different type of tasks used in the lesson.

Following I explain what the states consisted of.

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First, I explained the students what a flipped lesson is and all the 8 stations that were designed

for this class. Every single station had instructions to follow and the material needed for the

students to work in the stations.

In the stage two, I presented the students that for a flipped lesson the teachers’ role and the

students’ role change drastically because the teacher is a monitor who offers feedback and

clarifies doubts, and the students’ role is highly relevant since they had the possibility to

control their own learning process and help their classmate to enhance theirs too.

The third stage of the teaching practice happened when the students were introduced with

each station. I followed different classroom strategies (concept checking questions, drilling

the activity for the students) to clarify students` doubts and to guarantee they deeply

understood; the type of language skill(s) required in each station, the students` pattern

according to the type of task the station presented, and the cognitive abilities demanded in

each different task.

In the stage four, the students worked together in small groups of 4 to work in the station

they liked the most, moreover, the teacher went around the classroom having a passive

attitude and letting the students to work together in the challenging tasks. I only provided

feedback when the students first discussed among them for the solution of an issue and they

could not find the solution, second, any time that they needed re-explanation of the

instructions of a station, and finally, to clarify their doubts concerning a language issue.

In station eight, I controlled the time the students were in each station to give them all the

possibility to interact with their classmates and to use the language in meaningful ways. For

Instance; in station six, there were 4 modelling clay boxes students had to use, to create a

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memory from their past and present it in front of the classmates, therefore, a task like this

might take 20 minutes.

In the last stage of my teaching practice, the students had to organize the station they were

and change to the next station in the groups of 4 they formed at the beginning of the lesson,

thus, they had the chance to play and interact with all the stations.

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 Findings
The teaching practice depicted above had two major effects on students: they were

highly engaged with the tasks designed based on games because of the opportunity of using

the language as the only mean of communication( speaking- writing) these tasks offered,

likewise, the students increased their interaction, so they evidenced the benefits of different

types of interactions in the language classroom.

As it was described, the students involved in this teaching practice developed a more

fluent and natural use of the language since it was the only way how they communicated one

another in this lesson. Moreover, the lesson presented a stress-free learning environment

where the focus was on fluency rather than accuracy. Besides, the students improved their

usage of the language because they had the opportunity to provide feedback to the classmates,

they shared this lesson with. In addition, the students’ motivation for the English classes

incremented thanks to the flipped lesson based on the students’ positive responses not only

because they used the language in a more relaxing and freer way to work together solving

the cognitive demanding tasks but also because they expressed that they needed more time

for each station. As it was mentioned by a student “Teacher I want to play in all the stations

give us enough time”. The students recognized that the flipped lesson gave them the perfect

setting to interact with all the classmates, share personal opinions, life perspectives and ideas

about who they are, therefore, they liked this type of class.

Discussion
I consider that my students were able to keep fluent interactions using the language

as the only mean of communication thanks to they felt more relaxed and freer because they

could share with their peers. Therefore, this flipped lesson widely offered this type of

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interactions throughout appealing games for the students. Moreover, the students’

cooperation process in the lesson benefit their own language outcomes. This result could

have happened because they helped one another all the time providing feedback in respectful

and clear ways every time they made a mistake using the language. Lastly, my students’

reactions and outcomes suggested that their productive skills and their interactions in the

classroom positively advanced since the use of the FL lesson is a meaningful way of teaching

to enhance their learning process.

Conclusions and recommendations

In this paper my purpose was to enhance students’ interactions and productive skills

using a flipped lesson based on games. As I mentioned, I found that games are appealing

ways to encourage the students to use the language without being worried about the

correctness of their interactions because they are motivated solving the tasks designed for

this lesson. According to the findings of my teaching practices, I strongly believed that

English teachers need to incorporate a flipped lesson to their current teaching practices to

guarantee a variety of teaching styles to the students. I learned that a FL is an incredible

teaching approach in which students enjoy taking an active role while they work together to

solve the cognitive demanding tasks. Besides, I encourage the constant adaptation and

modification of the games and task based on the student’s linguistic skills and cognitive level

as well. In closing, using a FL approach guarantees a friendlier environment for the students

to learn the language making them to be more extrovert to speak and contributing with their

learning process because students that are more extrovert and who have a better self-esteem

are more likely to have better linguistic outcomes.

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References
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Conference on e-Learning (pp. 41-49). Harflied, UK: Academic Conferences Publishing.

Noora, H, McKnight, P, Arfstrom, K.M, McKnight, K. (2013). Defining flipped learning

Research Committee (Eds.), a Review of Flipped Lesson (pp. 3-6). Fair fox, USA: Pearson.

Tomczyk, Ł, Oyelere, S, Puentes, A, Sánchez-Castillo, G, Muñoz, D, Simsek, B, Akyar, Y,

Demirhan, G. (2018). Adult Education: Flipped learning, digital storytelling as the new

solutions in adult education and school pedagogy. Paper presented at Transformation in the

Era of Digitization and Artificial Intelligence. Praha/Prague, 2018.