Flipping it just for some

I had to introduce the topic of languages and language diversity to my C1.1 class, so I decided to create an activity that was like a project that would take up several classes. In this activity, my students had to form groups of around 5 people, and they would be a Committee of Wise Persons which, after several oral activities dealing with the topic of languages and providing them with diverse information and points of view, would have to reach a consensus and issue a joint statement. My idea was mainly to have them hold small debates on different points, and then provide them with a video or another resource to make them reconsider their first ideas.

The objectives of this activity were to practice mainly oral interaction and listening on the topic of languages and, very importantly, to raise awareness on language diversity, challenging stereotypes and contributing to interculturality and multilingualism.

I started showing them a picture of a committee of wise persons and making them describe it and guess what that was – this is how I explained the activity. After that, I thought that it could be interesting to start with an introductory video on the matter, and I found this one on YouTube from The Economist, “Why do languages die?”, which I think is perfect because it’s easy to understand and deals with all the points that I wanted my students to talk about.

I played the video in the classroom and asked my students to discuss the questions that I added to Edpuzzle orally, in their committees, but I had a problem that we often have at EOIs: not everyone comes to class every day, so it is difficult to do a project that takes up several sessions, because you will probably have different people in the classroom, who will have no idea about what you did the previous day. So my solution for this was to share the introductory video with the people who did not come to the first session of the activity (more or less half of the class), so that, at least, they did something similar and became engaged with the idea of the Committee before the second session. In other words, I flipped the first class of the project for the ones who did not come.

For these students, I included a brief explanation of the Committee thing on the classroom Moodle, with the picture that I projected in the session, and then an explanation of the assignment, which involved watching the video and answering its questions, which most of my students did (even some who had been in class!). Thanks to this, I was able to continue with the activity in the following session.

The truth is that everything went very well, both the idea of doing this project and sharing the Edpuzzle video with the students who did not come. They thanked me for sharing it with them, and came to class with a clear idea of what we were working on.

However, one thing that I tend to do is to choose open questions over multiple choice, because I find them more enriching and authentic, and also because I usually do this type of things orally. In this case, I kept the questions open for the video, and I think that’s something that I won’t do next time, because it involved reading many answers and giving a lot of feedback, and an activity that was just an introduction took forever on my part. So, next time, if it’s just an introduction, I will keep it simpler. Otherwise, I have thought that I could use this tool for evaluating my students’ comprehension and expression skills. I will think about it and probably use it in the future for that!