How to creatively flip to online learning environments: a showcase of design and tools for an award-winning, online language teaching project

Most current language learning and teaching materials are designed for formal education settings, such as face-to-face or blended learning environments. As language education is being redefined during the pandemic, how to innovatively use multimodal tools to reach the intended learning outcomes has become imperative for language educators. The emergence of technology-mediated, task-based language teaching and communicative didactical approaches serve as a good solution for these challenges since it offers students opportunities to use the target language in authentic contexts for meaningful communication in virtual learning environments. In this study, captioned videos were innovatively introduced and played a complementary role in creating a “flipped classroom” learning environment to enhance learners’ virtual study experience during the pandemic in 2020. This paper showcases pedagogical framework and tools for online language teaching activities in the tertiary sector, with examples provided from Chinese as a foreign language setting. It considers how online language learners participate in synchronous and asynchronous learning activities and focuses on a student-centred approach while highlighting the social and communicative aspects of foreign language learning and teaching during and post-pandemic.