Abstract:

Introduction:
Wide use of digital technology and the effort to cater for different level students with multi-level individual strengths and weaknesses is tightly intertwined with blended differentiated flipped teaching and the automated evaluation of the learning capabilities and obstacles in acquiring foreign language skills. The blended learning approach has lately become very popular for many reasons, but particularly being the only operational choice due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Assessment based on digital technology is a major aspect of teaching and learning activities, used to gather the information about the ability of students to understand, built upon previously gained knowledge and multiple memories and thus acquire knowledge. Several programming languages are used to adjust the difficulty of the test which eventually assists learners to excel in mastering the English language more effectively and enables instructors to optimize their teaching qualities and evolve blending flipping classrooms and differentiated teaching techniques. The main aim of the present research protocol is to classify children according to their abilities in learning English as a foreign language into advanced and non-advanced/intermediate’ classes.

Methods:
A total of 205 eight years old children took part in the present study. All participants presented typical academic performance. Furthermore, all eight years old children attended English class for three years according to the syllabus of the Greek public school. The sources used to construct the tasks of the web application are based on the teaching material of third and fourth class textbook. The web application presents 23 different tasks to screen vocabulary expansion, reading comprehension, writing development, story sequencing, dialogue completion, role-play activities, linguistic consolidation, cognitive and metacognitive abilities, grammar-syntax correlation, cross-curricular knowledge enhancement, combination of items/phrases/ideas, numbering and counting. In our effort to enhance the procedure and make it accessible to a large sample of students in the future, we have created and deployed a client-server web application that implements its core characteristics. More specifically HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and MySQL were used.

Results:
Descriptive statistics are performed in order to obtain mean scores and standard deviations of participants in all 23 tasks. ANOVA revealed that eight-year-old typical achieving children present statistical differences (p<0.05, p<0.01) mostly in tasks that are related to the fourth-class curriculum.

Discussion:
The web application screener that has been used in the present protocol revealed statistically significant differences in English language knowledge between typical achieving children. In the same line of research, it is suggested that computer-based tests are able to identify needs, difficulties, successes and limitations that cause obstacles. The advantages of internet research are related to appearance as the student becomes a “player” and the test is eventually transformed into a “game”. It must be taken into consideration that the web application screener, can serve as the basis for blended learning (flipped and differentiated) because it can provide useful information about learners’ knowledge. Thus, it can help tutors provide the suitable teaching approach according to children’s specific needs and differentiations.

Keywords:

Blended learning, web application screener, English as a foreign language.