‘Flipped learning’ means getting to know the content of the next lesson at home in advance. This is what Finnish student do at home. We have found it an excellent thing for 50 years now.
So, one thing in foreign language teaching in Finland that has never changed even if new methods and ideas such as CLT have been introduced is what the students do at home:
Finnish students have always had to ‘translate’ or ‘study’ the textbook chapter of the next lesson in advance at home. It is a MUST. Much more important than having written exercises done.
The idea above may sound old-fashioned but the benefits are undeniable. There is no point in such a thing as working on a new chapter understanding half or even less of the content.
I have always first taught my students, especially if they are young, how the translation must take place in their minds . It is certainly worth a lesson or two. Usually there are always some students among 12 – 13-year-olds who learn this skill in groups for the first time in their lives. A good student is an ideal the ‘teacher’ in the group showing the others how the translation is done.
On some occasions doing a partial translation of the text into mother tongue can reveal massive gaps in the students’ reading comprehension. Even in some senior high classes some students have no idea how to translate the text. Remedial teaching for two weeks and they will get a hang of it. And then the foundation for learning is established. The final aim is to skip translation part at school altogether.
Reasons why advance home study / translations are vital
- First, there is no point in spending much time in the lesson checking the understanding of a text by translation into one’s mother tongue. Nevertheless, in the early stages of learning a new language translating the texts into the mother tongue is a must.
- Secondly, when we insist on the students doing the translation at home in peace and quiet at their own pace, precious time in lessons is saved for oral practices.
- Thirdly, as for the translation itself, the skill itself must not be taken for granted. It has to be taught separately since some students do not know how it should take place.
- To get started with translating a text the students have to know the meanings of the words in the chapter. In Finland we have always been lucky to have Finnish – English vocabulary lists for every chapter in the students’ workbooks. New words are introduced there and a lot of time is saved compared to using a dictionary every time a new word emerges in the text.
- What if the word is not in the word list or there is no such list available? We advise the students to consult a dictionary, a free one in the internet is the best option these days. The use of Google translator is an option too but it requires very little thought from the student’s part and deep-level learning suffers. Some modern electronic textbooks have an inbuilt dictionary as a quick tool.
- The best part in forcing the students to consult the wordlists is that by the time they have finished the ‘translation’ homework they will have done something with the new words half a dozen times learning them subconsciously. At least from English into their mother tongue.
- For the teacher it should not matter whether the translation is written in the notebook, translation of new words on top of the text lines or the student has the translation only in his/her head. As long as the student can promply give the translation in lesson, using a source or not, everything is ok.
- Once the translation skill has been learnt and the habit established less and less time in the lesson is spent on checking the understanding this way. It is taken for granted that the students have studied/translated the new chapter at home before the lesson.
- When the students come to class having studied the new text at home, they feel safe and confident. It is a long and boring lesson if they understand nothing of what is going on.
The foundation of every language lesson is studying or translating the new text beforehand at home (in the flipped learning style). It saves time and the students feel more confident in class.
CHECKING WRITTEN OR ORAL HOMEWORK
“Nothing new under the sun.” Not quite since my favourite, Number 2 Student-oriented checking of homework is very different from what I used at the beginning of my career.
When the lesson starts we tend to check the written and oral tasks that were part of the homework. This checking should not eat up too much of our time since the learning took place while the students were doing the exercises. Still, they need to know if their answers are correct or not and ideally this should also be a learning situation.
There are some ways to speed up the checking process and make it more efficient from the students’ point of view.
1 Teacher-oriented checking: The teacher does not get the answers at all from the students but correct answers are revealed little by little on the screen and the students quietly correct their mistakes. The teacher scrolls the text on the screen or he/she uses Power Point animations to hide the answers. Thus the teacher controls the time spent on each exercise. At the end the students are, of course, allowed to ask questions.
Of course, the old style ‘Checking written homework so that the teacher asks and one student at a time answers’ is also possible but it is more time-consuming.
2 Student-oriented checking: Each pair or group is given the correct answers on paper or on the screen and they do the checking themselves within the time given. What is good about this way of checking is that the students advise each other and checking becomes a learning situation too.
If this style is adapted, the teacher should tell the students why you are doing it and what the responsibilities of the students are. While the checking is going on the teacher has to go around the class to observe if someone’s homework is not done.
3 Checking can also be part of station work: If there are, for example, 5 stations/sets of tables, one can be devoted to checking homework. Station work or Work stations are effective as a special kind of group work. See how you can arrange a lesson like it.
N.B. Some teacher use a Google form where the students mark which of the exercises they have done. It is a public file within the class and the students easily point out if someone is trying to cheat. This file is also a document for the teacher and it can be taken into account when grades are given for the course.
The most important piece of homework: studying/translating the textbook chapter of the next lesson in advance at home.
- 1 Studying the chapter at home in advance
- 2 Checkingwritten or oral homework exercises
- 3 Working orally on the new words of the next chapter
- 4 Listening to the chapter on a CD, DVD, via the internet or read by the teacher
- 5 Checking if the content was understood, clarifications
- 6 Reading the text aloud
- 7 Questions on the text, or multiple choice, true-false, black holes …
- 8 Doing oral (and written exercises/underlining the text) in class
