Efficacy of a flipped-learning CLIL course in content teaching and promoting the target language skills

2020 Fiscal Year Research-status Report

• Project/Area Number: 20K00783
• Research Institution: Tokai University
• Principal Investigator: 田中エリス 伸枝 東海大学, 国際教育センター, 准教授 (70593698)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): 関口 幸代 明治学院大学, 文学部, 准教授 (20524466)
• Project Period (FY): 2020-04-01 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: Flipped Learning / CLIL / teacher trainees / oral output / learning environment

Outline of Annual Research Achievements

This research attempts to delineate the relationship between a learning environment, CLIL, task types, and student oral outputs. The course under study, “Technology and Language Learning” is a technology-assisted flipped learning CLIL course offered to undergraduate English teacher trainees.
As the first year of the study, we attempted to identify what skills and knowledge can be taught in the course. Due to the drastic change we had to make in teaching environment in 2020 due to the pandemic and inability to attract enough students to conduct the proposed study, we have decided to use this year to refine the syllabi and decide how we collect data if this situation continues to the following year.

Current Status of Research Progress

3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.

Reason

Due to the current COVID-19 situation, all classes were shifted to online. Usually, the courses under study usually attract about 20 students who are training to become high school English teachers, however, there was only one student enrolled. We have decided that we are going to document the materials used for the both courses, however, it was too stressful for the student if we collected data in this situation.

Strategy for Future Research Activity

We are going to promote the course to attract more students. Fortunately, the current situation raised awareness of the necessity of having good understanding of ICT and language education. After revising the syllabi, we found that content was too heavy and too theory-oriented. Therefore, for 2021, more refined and practical components will be added to the course. Also, the 2020 syllabi focused more on ICT in general and the link between ICT and English learning and teaching was not clearly shown. As the situation in 2020 was unexpected, we were not prepared to collect data online, and from one registered student (in both semesters). We are now able to picture how to run courses for a very small amount of students, and be flexible so data will be collected for the next two or three years.

Causes of Carryover

We are going to collect data regardless of the number of students who are enrolled. The unused amount will be used to employ research assistants for sorting and transcribing the data.