What I figured out from the mess I had created was that I could actually make several connections between different interest areas of mine. I had originally wanted to address Krashen's (1981) Affective Hypothesis Theory, a theory that deals with the emotional factors present within a conducive learning environment; then I decide to include the technological element of video-conferencing; then somewhere I along the way, I got distracted with the innovativeness of the flipped classroom concept.
To test out some of my ideas, I have decided to create an ESL Conversation course that does not include great lengths of in-class, simulated discussions, as most typical courses do. Instead, students will take the conversation outside the classroom. I will connect them with an online language exchange partner who they must video-conference with for at least two hours each week. This is instead of vocab/grammar fill-in-the-blank homework. Students are required to take notes and write a report of what happened in each Skype conversation. Then, when they bring this to class, we can review real-life situations and problems that occur when the ESL students attempt to speak with and understand the speech patterns of native speakers.
