Personalising a writing course with a flipped classroom approach

We present a writing course that uses a flipped classroom approach for personalised learning (Deroey & Skipp, 2023). The student-centred course design has at its core non-instructor-led activities and allows us to accommodate linguistically and disciplinary heterogeneous groups of PhD students. It considers practical issues such as PhD students’ busy schedules (Casanave, 2010), their ability to work independently and limited staff resources. The course has been very successfully delivered several times, both fully and partly online.
This writing course provides insight into the structural, stylistic and rhetorical features of research articles as well as the writing and publication process. Students first submit an ‘independent learning task’ in which they apply theory from the book to their writing. Teachers use this output to illustrate key theory points and to provide further practice in the subsequent workshop. Additionally, students submit article drafts with their reflections (Yasuda, 2011) and receive feedback through peer review and consultations (Cho & MacArthur, 2010).
Our course design has several advantages. First, it allows personalised learning and differentiated teaching. Second, it limits the number of workshops and maximises their value. Third, it stimulates novice research writers to become writing researchers, promoting continuous learning.
References
Casanave, C. P. (2010). Dovetailing under impossible circumstances. In C. Aitchison, B. Kamler, & A. Lee (Eds.), Publishing pedagogies for the doctorate and beyond (pp. 47-63). Routledge.
Cho, K., & MacArthur, C. (2010). Student revision with peer and expert reviewing. Learning and Instruction, 20, 328-338.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Skipp, J. (2023). Designing and delivering an online research article writing course for doctoral students in Luxembourg during Covid-19. In B. Fenton-Smith, J. Gimenez, K. Mansfield, M. Percy, & M. Spinillo (Eds.), International perspectives on teaching academic English in turbulent times (pp. 81-94). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003283409-10
Yasuda, S. (2011). Genre-based tasks in foreign language writing: Developing writers’ genre awareness, linguistic knowledge, and writing competence. Journal of Second Language Writing, 20(2), 111-133.