FLIPPING THE ESL CLASSROOM.STRATEGIES FOR COMMUNICATION AND INCLUSION

One of the most interesting and recent teaching approach that is attracting insistently both academic and teaching environments, is the Flipped Classroom, or Inverted Classroom. The class, where there is a turning over of the activities with the purpose of making both lessons and individual study more interesting and productive is “flipped”. This approach is fundamentally based on three issues: 1) a conscious use of technologies for learning/teaching purposes, 2) a revision of learning times, 3) the importance of the educational relationship. The flipped is also an answer to the teacher's aim to solve problems related to the learning process, that means, to create the best condition through which students can be aware of what they learn and find out a personal method of learning. The Flipped model is particularly suitable for the ESL classes as it allows to create the best learning setting. The reasons is that workroom setting of the classroom, where the language is a tool and, at the same time, the object of the learning process, allows that the language be practiced and improved in a very natural way. Moreover, when students are outside the classroom, the free access to the internet, the data retrieval in original language besides the materials provided by the teachers for the students, represent a quantity of language resources hardly to find in any traditional lecture classroom. Besides, the Flipped Classroom gives the chance to diversify teachers’ activity according to personal learning styles, abilities, cognitive ways of learning, even in case of SEN. This paper presents a research now in progress, within the frame of the Phd in “Pedagogical and Didactic Teacher Training”, carried out by the Educational Sciences Department of the University of Palermo in the triennium 2015-2018. Moving from the idea o giving teachers a theoretical and didactic background to flip their classroom and their teaching, this research project aims at the experimentation of the flipped strategies in a language class of Secondary School first grade, with the purpose to activate linguistic and communicative inclusive learning process accessible to all students. This research also aims at leading teachers to think about the necessity to changed their professional profile, pointing out the importance of efficiency, reflective practice, affective relationship with the students.