Sessions /
The evolution of a four-dimensional EFL classroom #1356

Teaching students only English is not enough these days. While students do need to master the four skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening, they also need the skills known as the 4Cs: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication. Additionally, there is a need to foster students' character and metacognitive abilities. The Center for Curriculum Redesign’s Four-Dimensional Education Framework (Fadel, Bialik, & Trilling, 2015) is designed to foster all of those traits in students. The framework emphasizes the importance of four dimensions that are essential to learners in the 21st century: knowledge, skills, character, and metacognition. A flipped learning approach was used to assign the grammar drills as homework and class time was spent participating in group tasks and projects that utilized the homework and integrated various dimensions of the framework. This study examines student perceptions about their growth as English language learners over a semester-long, first-year required EFL course with a focus on grammar. The course was held in the spring semester each year. Data were collected over three consecutive years from three different groups of students by analyzing the instructor’s syllabi, student reflection sheets and a voluntary post-course survey. How the tasks and projects were designed and implemented over each semester to engage students with the traits from the framework will be discussed. Additionally, ways that other educators can implement the framework and the various tasks and projects will be shared.