Technology, the flipped classroom, and exigent paradigm shifts or being forced into the present

Princeton University, including the various language programs it offers, has intentionally resisted distance learning for decades, primarily out of a desire to concentrate on the residential undergraduate educational experience. While the COVID-19 pandemic prompted sweeping changes to policies regarding remote instruction, they were temporary and are already, albeit irregularly, reverting to established, pre-pandemic norms. At the level of individual course or program curricula, however, potentially enduring adjustments have now taken root. In our second-year German courses, a convergence of factors, from video-based instructional modes and assignments to the poorly timed, as it felt then, roll-out of a new learning management system (LMS), have reshaped and helped redesign our approach to computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in the taught curriculum, classroom time, homework, and the modes of communication prioritized in assignments.

Pandemic-related disruptions and institutional responses to them varied geographically and politically. In New Jersey, USA, state-level restrictions and institutional decisions resulted in the closure of campus instructional spaces from the halfway point of the 2020 spring semester through the end of the 2020–2021 academic year, with further precautions, mitigations, and flexible responses throughout the following academic year, including but not limited to frequent reversion to remote instruction during periods of high incidence, interior masking requirements, and social distancing when possible in classroom spaces. This situation prompted two sets of considerations, the first centered on adapting a remote instruction curricular and technological framework, the second on returning, however haltingly, to “normal” while adapting previous changes to unusual in-person environments.

Our department was among the initial LMS implementation group in fall 2020. For the past six years, I have also redesigned, expanded, and aligned our second-year German program with the first year, which is based on a high-frequency core vocabulary and the development of contextual reading strategies, among other approaches (for a detailed description of approach, form, and function, see Oberlin, in press). In the spring semester of 2020 prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, I began testing the development of a new online curricular platform on the Canvas LMS (https://www.instructure.com/canvas), which has subsequently fully replaced Blackboard (https://www.blackboard.com/) at Princeton. The first semester of the Canvas implementation thus coincided with the first semester of fully remote instruction, while the remote half-semester prior remained on Blackboard; pre-pandemic, the LMS was used primarily as a repository for syllabi, electronic documents, and discussion boards.

In the immediate context of the institutional shutdown effective March 14, 2020, which was announced just before the week of spring break, faculty had approximately 9 days to reenvision remote instruction to commence the week after. Of the many tools and approaches considered during this frantic and bewildering week, one stands out: the application of outside-of-class student-to-student communication via Zoom or other video-conferencing technologies with written follow-up to fulfill a number of desiderata: (1) that students speak more in an alternate assignment format given the realities of affective and technological hurdles while using video conferencing software; (2) that they are provided with an unsupervised opportunity to speak in an effort to reduce anxiety; (3) that self-scheduled partner work might offer flexibility necessary during home-based study and the various complications and distractions that entails, particularly during a period of ongoing disruptions; and (4) that a written response to this oral communication would generate classroom discussion, deepen engagement with materials, and present instructors with another avenue for teacher–student feedback and the assessment of sentence- or paragraph-level writing. While other types of oral communication were considered, for example, asynchronous recordings (see Ly, 2022), unrecorded and unobserved communication was selected for one type of assignment in order to foster confidence in speaking in an unusual environment of increased affective hurdles (Conroy & Lykens, 2022, pp. 119–120).

This weekly assignment, a meaning-focused task (see Heift & Rimrott, 2012, on the efficacy of CALL task types in German) called a Partnergespräch in our curriculum, consists of a 20-min voice- or voice and video-based conversation between two or at most three students, based on a given prompt, usually a set of questions about curricular materials and the use of certain grammatical forms (e.g., the past subjunctive or the passive) and followed by a written exercise submitted on the LMS, either a summary of the partner's contributions or a reflection on the outcome of the conversation if a synthesis or agreement is requested. Any technology during remote instruction was allowed, provided that students did not simply text, email, or otherwise write to one another without speaking; students reported using Zoom, Facetime, Skype, Facebook Messenger, and telephone calls to complete the assignments. Now that we have returned to classroom teaching, some students choose to meet in person and others continue to meet virtually due to preference or ease of scheduling. Examples of current topics and materials across both second-year courses include analyzing specific themes or passages in novels and graphic novels (e.g., Heimat, Krug, 2018; Madgermanes, Weyhe, 2016; Im Westen nichts Neues, Remarque, 2014), films, and other materials tied to units on topics such as small text forms, rhetoric, phraseology, and media linguistics. Student responses from past semesters are shared anonymously after certain class discussions with current cohorts, particularly when opinions or perspectives diverge or shift over time.

While instructors are unable to listen to the conversations (i.e., they are both unsupervised and unrecorded, a different approach than the dialogues discussed in Groepper, 2022), the conversations and the written responses have led to increased participation on assigned topics, materials, and questions in class, and course evaluations also suggest that they have been effective. For example, a student in an intensive intermediate course during the interrupted semester (spring 2020) mentioned that “I actually got more speaking practice than I would have due to the regularly scheduled discussions with the professor and my conversation partner. This sort of structure is great for online classes, and should be adopted more widely.” In the summer of 2020, a remote course took the place of our immersion program in Munich, during which a student in an intermediate class noted that “the structure of one-on-one partnered discussions” was “always helpful.” Another in an advanced course during the first fully remote semester (fall 2020) said “[m]y spoken German improved a lot in this course. The Partnergespräch was a big part of this.” After we returned to in-person instruction and the assignments were maintained as part of an increasingly utilized flipped-classroom approach, an advanced student in the tumultuous fall of 2021 provided feedback that has since proved beneficial: “Many of the assignments were great and wonderful [for] thinking and writing in German; however, I felt that the frequencies of the Partnergespräche were unhelpful and sometimes prioritized breadth over depth. I would prefer them to be longer and weekly rather than shorter and more frequent.” Both structures, twice and once weekly with shorter and longer prompts, are now in place in the third and fourth semesters, respectively.

These assignments are broadly applicable to live, hybrid, and remote instructional modes. They can be scaled to a large extent in terms of the overall number, spacing, time span, prompts, and follow-up tasks and are technologically accessible to any student with a computer or smartphone or, in the case of live instruction, to all students without technological assistance and therefore bear no cost. The assignments support flipped curricula in providing a pre-lesson space for engaging with materials and one's peers before dealing with a topic in writing, all of which precede classroom discussions and activities. They can be minimally burdensome in terms of student time, that is, in our curriculum, they often replace other grammatical or lexical homework on days they are assigned rather than add to extant tasks. This is one small part of an overall Complex Adaptive Blended Language Learning System approach (Ortner, 2021; Wang et al., 2015) that seeks to center pedagogy over technology and adapt to changing circumstances, local conditions, student needs, and program goals. Furthermore, we hope that this and similar changes to the curriculum will continue to bridge the gap between theories of learner autonomy and the efficacy of task-based language learning (Schmenk, 2012).