Poster Presentation

Flipping the ESP Classroom
Steven J. Kirk
The University of TokyoDavid Casenove
The University of Tokyo
Flipping the classroom is a recent trend in education that involves reversing the traditional
instructional approach. In the traditional classroom, information is presented in class
via teacher lectures, and practical application is done through homework. In the flippedclassroom, information is presented through readings or videos that students study at home,
and then the practical application is done in the classroom, in groups to facilitate peer
instruction, and with concurrent feedback and assistance from the teacher. In this paper, we
will show how this has been applied to an EFL writing course at the University of Tokyo,
which is focused on the writing of scientific research papers. In particular, we will discuss theuse of videos created to present material that would traditionally be explained in class by theteacher, and examples of the kinds of activities that can be done in class with time freed upby the use of the videos.

What Is Flipped Learning?

Over the last several years, flipping the classroom has become a trending topic
in education discussions. While many teachers have heard the term, it is often
not well understood, and its application to English language teaching has not
yet been explored in depth (Başal, 2012; Zhang & Chen, 2014). In this paper,
we will describe how flipped learning can be applied to an English for SpecificPurposes (ESP) writing class, and how this can result in much more effective andefficient use of the limited class time available for teacher-student interaction.
The term flipped classroom (and later, flipped learning) was coined by highschool chemistry teachers Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams (Bergmann &119Kirk & Casenove

Sams, 2012). In the traditional classroom, new material is presented to students
in class through lectures by the teacher. Students then apply what they havelearned in homework exercises done at home. In the flipped-learning approach,students first watch videos or read material covering the content of the lectures
at home and then apply that material in exercises in class (Tucker, 2012). The‘flipping’ is essentially that the lecture is done at home and the homework is donein class. The video or screencast format allows students to take in new material
at their leisure and at their own pace. If there are parts of the material that they
do not understand, they can clarify these points in the following class with theteacher or their classmates, or online, for example, through classroom forums.
Although the videos are the most visible and well-known aspect of flipped
learning, the most important innovations are in the activities that can be donein the classroom with the time freed up by off-loading lectures to videos (Sams& Bergmann, 2013). This increases the time for face-to-face interaction between
students and allows the teacher to provide individualized support to students
while they attempt to apply the material covered by the videos to exercises thatwould traditionally be given as homework.
Flipped learning is most readily applicable to classes that contain large
amounts of information that needs to be transmitted, such as high school orundergraduate science courses (Sams & Bergmann, 2013). Language courses,
particularly in the communicative language teaching paradigm, tend to be
more focused on practice and already incorporate active elements such as group
work. However, in the case of second-language academic writing, there remain
limitations that can be addressed through flipped learning. One is that students
are unable to get assistance from the teacher during the actual writing, which
is done at home. Another is that they may not understand the explanationsof scientific writing conventions given by the teacher in class. Another very
important limitation is that teacher feedback comes late in the process after
the writing assignment has been completed by the student and often with noopportunity to immediately apply the feedback. The flipped learning approach
can address these limitations by utilizing the limited class time for face-to-facestudent-student and teacher-student interactions more effectively.
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Flipping a Scientific Writing Course

In the next section, we will demonstrate the application of flipped learning toa first-year academic writing course for science students, taught by the authors
at the University of Tokyo. The objective of this course is to learn how to write
scientific research papers in the typical IMRaD (Introduction, Method, Results,
and Discussion) format, based on a small-scale experiment of their own design,
which is conducted as homework during the first half of the semester. There are
typically 15 students in one class, which is composed of weekly sessions of 90
minutes over one semester. As frequently occurs in Japan, most of the students
have had six years of English study in secondary education, but they have neverwritten anything in English beyond the length of a single sentence or paragraph,so the task of writing what tends to become a paper of about 8-14 pages, is quite
daunting. To illustrate the nature of the differences between a more traditional
approach and a flipped approach, we will contrast the examples of lessons on thewriting of the Method section of a scientific research paper.

Traditional Teaching Approach

In the traditional approach, the teacher presents the material through lecture
and teacher-centered discussion. For this topic, this includes the structure of
the method section and the rules of academic writing which are relevant to thissection—for example, the use of active and passive voice, the avoidance of firstand second-person pronouns. This is done through awareness-raising activities
and analyses of examples from authentic research papers. At home, students
write their own method section for their experiment. In the following class,students do peer review, followed by a rewrite of their draft for submission to
the teacher. After the teacher reads and comments on the drafts, students receive
feedback from the teacher and are able to use that to improve their writing, if
they are so inclined, and if they understand the feedback.

Flipped Learning Approach

In the flipped learning approach, new material, which would have traditionallybeen presented by the teacher in class, is presented at home through materials
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such as screeencasts, videos of lectures, or even readings (Bergmann & Sams,2012). A short quiz is given either online or at the beginning of the followingclass to check comprehension of the video and to ensure that students watch
it. In this particular example of learning to write the Method, the homework
consists of two videos, one on the organization and content of the Method(Figure 1) and one on the language of the Method (Figure 2)—each under 10
minutes. Depending on teacher’s lesson plan, each video may be assigned for aseparate class or both may be assigned for the same class. In the following class,students apply what they have learned in the videos through activities leading
to the collaborative writing of a Method section in groups based on a mocklab notebook page based on a Method section of a published research paper(Mickens & Wheeler, 2012; Figure 3). During this time, students can help eachother with aspects of the videos that they did not fully understand, and ask theteacher questions as they come up. The teacher can observe the groups’ efforts
and correct problems and explain issues that arise. For example, one difficult
aspect of the Method section for learners of English is the use of the passive
voice. As they write the Method, they can discuss together whether to use passive

Figure 1. Screenshot from video “How to write the Method section, Part 1: Organization andcontent”. Videos are posted online for students to access easily. The image shown is accompanied
by verbal explanation by the instructor—in this case, explaining the content that comprises thefirst part of the Method section.

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Figure 2. Screenshot from video “How to write the Method section, Part 2: Language andscientific writing style”. In this particular section of the video, the instructor is explaining theuse of passive voice with examples from a published research paper on the effects of different
chemicals on the browning of apple slices (Son, Moon, & Lee, 2001). The particular construction
being discussed is highlighted in the screencast while being explained in the audio.

or not in each case, and the teacher can look at what they have written and give
immediate feedback.
After completing their collaborative Method section, they compare what
they wrote with the published Method section that comes from the paper thatinspired the lab notebook (in this case, Mickens & Wheeler, 2012) to guide them
toward noticing gaps in their own production. After this class, students write a
Method section for their own experiment alone at home as in the traditional
approach, but it is the second Method that they have written, rather than thefirst.
In the following class, pairs of students review each other’s writing for bothcontent and the language points specific to the Method section, following achecklist provided by the teacher. After or during the review, they also talk with
their partner about their paper. While this is going on, the teacher can talkto students individually about their writing, giving feedback and answering
questions. This allows the feedback to be more interactive, where the teacher
can discuss the feedback directly with the student, and focused on just those123

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Figure 3. Sample lab notebook page describing the set-up for an experiment to be used by students
to collaboratively write a practice method section of a research paper in class. Thanks to Jillian
Healy for this activity and lab notebook page.

aspects that the students cannot resolve with peer assistance—something thatis much more difficult for a teacher to do when giving only written feedback on
writing outside of class. Overall, the flipped learning approach results in more
efficient use of class time for more writing practice and for more timely, effective
feedback.

Conclusions

The key point that must be emphasized is that although flipped learning is
generally associated with the use of videos, it is what is done with class time,124

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rather than the videos themselves, that is the most important aspect of theapproach. Even though the multimodal format may have advantages in termsof being less daunting and more entertaining than a reading assignment, thematerial could be presented just as well through readings or a combination of
both. However, if the content of the video materials assigned as backgroundhomework is presented again in class, the classroom has not been flipped, andthe limited time that the teacher has with the students has not been used mosteffectively and efficiently.
Of course, there are some disadvantages and challenges with this approach. A
significant amount of time is needed to make the videos. Once videos are made,however, they can be reused, and after some time, a library of videos for a course
can be created. This approach has been criticized in that it may lead to a kind of‘professional suicide’ (Rees, 2015), where teachers are replaced by Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs) using videos of their own lectures (Rees, 2015).
However, this misses the most important point of the flipped learning approach:the teacher’s feedback and assistance in the application done in the classroom is
crucial and not trivial. It is this increased time for teacher-student interaction
with the material, rather than one-way transmission of information, that is a core
concept of the flipped learning approach.
In conclusion, flipping the ESP classroom can help to increase students’
engagement in class activities, free up time for more application with teacher
supervision, and provide the students with more timely and personalized
feedback. We have noticed that the quality of students’ papers have improved
since the implementation of this approach, and particular problems that used
to be very common have become rare. Taking the method section above as an
example, students tend to overuse the first-person pronouns, rather than using
the passive voice, making their writing sound more like a diary than a sciencepaper. The flipped learning approach provides students with more time to digest
the rules of passive usage, more practice with using them, and more exposure
to examples in real research papers, which helps them to really assimilate thismaterial and avoid this problem. It also minimizes the amount of time thatstudents spend sitting and passively listening in classes, which is typically a large
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proportion of a student’s day (Strauss, 2014).
Although there is extensive empirical support for active learning pedagogicalpractices more generally (see Bonwell & Eison, 1991), flipped learning, as arelatively new methodology, has not been well investigated in the context of
ESP writing. However, recent research with a pharmacy program has found thatstudents’ performance significantly improved with a flipped classroom over the
traditional lecture method (Pierce & Fox, 2012). Also, Japanese students in an
EFL setting found flipped classrooms to be a positive experience where they
had more opportunities to communicate with the language (Mehring, 2015).
Future research is needed to provide more empirical evidence to support theeffectiveness of this approach. However, the potential for more practice andteacher-student interaction, and the more effective use of class time, would bea valuable addition to any class, not only ESP academic writing, and flipped
learning has bright prospects for student outcomes.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Jillian Healy for the lab notebook activity used in theexample above, and Jérémie Seror for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Author bios

Steve Kirk is an applied linguist specializing in second language acquisition andparticularly the acquisition of spoken fluency. He has taught EFL/ESL in the US
and Japan over the last 20 years, and currently teaches scientific research paper
writing in the ALESS (Active Learning of English for Science Students) Program atthe University of Tokyo. skirk@aless.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp127Kirk & Casenove

David Casenove is a paleobiologist who specializes in the study of Early Cambriannektonic ecosystems. He joined the ALESS (Active Learning of English for Science
Students) Program at the University of Tokyo in 2011 in order to familiarize
Japanese students with the logical articulation of scientific communication by oral
and writing. dcasenove@aless.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Received: November 16, 2014
Accepted: September 1, 2015

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