Abstract:

In Kazakhstan, the foreign language policy requires students to start learning English as a second language (ESL) in elementary school and keep learning it in the undergraduate and graduate levels. However, regardless of time spent for learning English, Kazakhstani students have low or very low second language proficiency (First, 2014). One of the reasons for students’ poor knowledge may be their teachers’ use of traditional drill-and-practice methodology. Students acquire second language skills in the context of abstract rules and examples, which does not lead to the fluency in a target language environment. A number of studies in the domain of ESL revealed that the flipped instructions increase students’ emotional engagement (Jamaludin & Osman, 2014), promote active learning (Doman & Webb, 2014) and interactions with teachers and students (Hung, 2014; Doman & Webb, 2014; Lee, 2014), which may lead to the positive academic performance (Hung, 2014), listening, speaking (Chu, 2014), and writing (Farah, 2014) skills enhancement. At the same time, in spite of the positive attitudes toward the flipped learning pedagogy and increased ESL performance, students may still prefer teacher’s explanations in class and favour the traditional instructions over the flipped instructions (Farah, 2014; Doman & Webb, 2014). Thus, the purpose of the present pilot study is to explore Kazakhstani ESL students’ attitudes toward the instructional videos and to identify the features of the video that were the most and least helpful for grammar, vocabulary, and listening skills acquisition.

This pilot study involved a convenience sample of fourteen intermediate ESL undergraduates enrolled at the major Technical University in Kazakhstan. Students required watching two videos before the class at home. Both videos were created using the Office Mix platform and were aimed to explain the rules and master the Present Perfect grammar skills as well as to practice vocabulary and listening comprehension skills. The analysis of the open-ended questionnaire established that students found the grammar explanations easy to understand and remember. One student reported that instructor in a video “explains not worse than our teachers in school”. After watching the video some of the students showed an interest in getting better understanding of the grammatical peculiarities they faced with in the video and asked questions on the Office Mix class webpage. Generally, students found exercises helpful; however, the majority would prefer to do various types of exercises in the form of dialogues and crosswords. Among the other helpful features, students named the option of pausing and re-watching the videos, as many times as they needed, however, they would prefer subtitles. One student mentioned that the native speaker’s speech in the video was too fast. The background music was destructing for the majority of the students and they suggested to change it. Additionally, students who watched the videos on the smartphone reported that the pictures and exercises were too small for successful work. Nevertheless, some students reported that the instructional videos motivated them to learn English.

Keywords:

Flipped Learning, ESL, English Grammar.