Flipped teaching method implementation to improve students’ vocabulary.

Abstract

The objective of this research was to demonstrate the incidence of the flipped teaching method in students’ vocabulary. The participants were 63 students from the eighth school year at "Fe y Alegría” School. They were between 13-14 years old. The research employed a quasi-experimental design including pre-test and post-test. At the beginning of the implementation it was necessary to know the perspectives of the current teaching practice to develop student’s vocabulary in EFL classes. So, it was evident that students use limit words to express their ideas and thoughts. The pre-test and post-test were applied and analyzed on the basis of a validated rubric for eight year school learners. There were five questions to evaluate the vocabulary. The instruments were validated to ensure results reliability. The participants were introduced to the flipped teaching method activities, so the weekly lessons were planned for five weeks. Each weekly lesson involved 40 minutes virtual class and one hour of autonomous learning at home in order to practice the use of new vocabulary in real contexts. Participants were expected to be tested on the basis of a particular content taken from the institutional final assessments as a post-test after the implementation of the activities the results were analyzed through the statistical test of hypothesis: T-student test for dependent sample because the researcher aimed to demonstrate if the flipped teaching method improves students’ vocabulary used in different activities to show their language performance. The results indicated that the implementation of activities with flipped teaching method improves students’ vocabulary significantly, and they had a positive perception of the method. Therefore, teachers should consider implementing the flipped teaching method as a part of their classes to improve students’ vocabulary. Moreover, the results showed the flipped method increases students’ motivation as well as their confidence to participate more in class.