Flip my classroom for CLs

                     

When I’m already get used to traditional classroom, this flipped classroom approach surprises me with its creative idea of language teaching. Unlike the old classroom that ask students to do homework at home, flipped classroom does homework and activities during the class time instead, aims to improve students’ critical thinking ability with them interacting with peers and teachers. The two articles talk about flipped classroom approach mainly for ELs, but I think this approach works for other foreign language learning/teaching also, and I’ll definitely bring it to my Chinese teaching classroom in the future.

For Chinese teaching/learning, the most difficult part is the foundation, like 

Pinyin and radical, it’s hard to increase learners’ comprehension because it usually takes very long time of them to remember words’ pronunciation and tones, and how to write down radicles in right order, so if I teach these during my class time, it would take me hours and hours to give presentation based on my old experiences. However, flipped classroom helps me solve this problem easily by switching teaching and learning scenarios. I can make a teaching demonstration video and ask learners to watch them at home, so they would have enough time to either make charts or draw pictures or whatever methods they would like to use to help them remembering differences among Pinyins and radicals.

But I have a concern about the in-class part, since learners need to do activities collaboratively, then how do we teachers treat students with different reactiveness fairly? For instance, if the teacher ask students to do a fill-in-blank exercise as a group work, the students in fast reactiveness will finish the work really quick while students with slow reactiveness even don't have time to tell the difference between this and that, then can we say fast-react students are good learners but slow-react ones are not? I don’t think so, they need more time to think doesn’t mean their comprehension is low at all. Thus, I think we teachers really should take this into consider and so to design fit-for-everybody exercises in order to make fair and correct evaluation for every student. And only we put as much situation as we can into consideration while we are still exploring, can we really make flipped classroom a useful and helpful approach for language teaching/learning.