Visualizing the ICT-Assisted Flipped Pedagogical Approach in EFL Education

Introduction

A flipped classroom has been deemed as a rising pedagogical approach that integrates lecturing videos into students’ self-regulated learning out of class through reviewing the learned contents or preview what will be learned before class (DeLozier & Rhodes, 2017; Yu, 2019). In the flipped classroom, the delivered contents in a traditional classroom are moved out of class and shown to learners through information and communication technology (ICT) assisted tools, e.g. mobile applications. The in-class delivery in a traditional classroom is replaced with dynamic and collaborative learning activities (Abeysekera and Dawson, 2014).

The ICT assisted flipped pedagogical approach included the integration of ICT into learning and teaching process (Al-Zahrani, 2015). An increasing number of scholars have recently been paying much attention to the role the information technology plays in learning and teaching. Recent work has shed light on how to integrate ICT into teaching and learning. Under the flipped classroom model, students could also have convenient access to extracurricular contents through ICT.

The ICT assisted flipped pedagogical approach has caught much attention due to its success in education. Its effectiveness and efficiency in EFL learning and teaching have, however, not been immensely explored and discussed. It is thus necessary to go through the literature to find out the missing links in studies on the flipped classroom especially in EFL language learning and teaching fields.

Although there have been some reviews on the ICT assisted flipped pedagogical approach, a large number of aspects of the flipped approach have not been discussed in EFL language learning and teaching. For example, in EFL language flipped approach, there is a strong potential for using ICT in the flipped classroom due to a number of features of ICT well suited for preparations out of class in the flipped approach. Despite the advantages of the flipped approach in EFL language learning have been frequently explored, a systematic analysis of them has rarely been touched on, let alone the disadvantages in the flipped EFL language classroom. The supervision over students out of class may be a headache to teachers and teaching designers. How to prepare the in-class learning activities may cost teachers’ a huge amount of time, which may lead teachers to resist against this flipped approach. Use of ICT in the flipped approach will definitely require financial investment, which raises an unavoidable question: is the ICT assisted flipped pedagogical approach in EFL education feasible? These questions have been rarely synthesized especially in the field of EFL language pedagogy.

Based on the above description and literature, we therefore raised four research questions: (1) What is the status quo of the ICT assisted flipped pedagogical approach in EFL education? (2) What is the number of recent publications and citations, co-citation clusters of the cited literature, citation counts, and rankings by bursts, centrality, and sigma in the ICT assisted flipped pedagogical approach in EFL education? (3) What are the advantages of the ICT assisted flipped pedagogical approach in EFL education? (4) What are the disadvantages of the ICT assisted flipped pedagogical approach in EFL education?