A FLIPPED CLASSROOM APPROACH TO DEVELOPING TERMINOLOGICAL COMPETENCE IN ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

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A FLIPPED CLASSROOM APPROACH TO DEVELOPING
TERMINOLOGICAL COMPETENCE IN ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC
PURPOSES
N. Troufanova, K. Inozemtseva, G. Kirsanova, N. Nikolayeva
Bauman Moscow State Technical University (RUSSIAN FEDERATION)
Abstract
Lexical and terminological knowledge are core components of a foreign language professional
communicative competence. However, specialized vocabulary acquisition presents a number of
challenges due to the differences in structural and semantic characteristics of L1 and L2 terminological
systems. In recent years, some innovative approaches and techniques have been used in the
presentation of new vocabulary items in English courses for specific purposes (ESP) at Bauman
Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU). Most of these techniques tend to be associated with
blended learning, student-centered approaches, and peer interaction.
With this paper, the authors discuss the use of the flipped classroom model in teaching subject-
specific terminology to master’s students in the BMSTU Engineering Business and Management
Department. The flipped learning experience involved 46 attending students and lasted for three
months during the first semester of their ESP course. The course covered three interrelated thematic
units (Sources of Innovation, Innovation and the Development Process, and Feasibility Studies) and
included diverse lexical material. The language of these business areas uses a variety of genres and
styles, terms borrowed from specialized technical fields, buzzwords, neologisms, abbreviations,
compounds, and a large number of metaphors and idiomatic expressions.
The present study is organized around four aspects: selecting materials for outside-of-class
preparation and placing them online, highlighting challenges in specialist vocabulary acquisition, using
effective scaffolding tools for in-class vocabulary activities and after-class extended learning, and
carrying out students’ terminological competence assessments.
First, we research and analyze authentic materials that were selected and integrated into the
university open source learning platform, including subject-related information (lectures and
presentations, podcasts, graphs, diagrams, statistics in charts, and relevant articles) and sources of
terminological knowledge (corpora of business and technical vocabulary, online dictionaries, and
visual thesauri).
Secondly, we consider the students’ needs and difficulties in relation to their terminological
competence. The paper outlines issues and challenges of specialized vocabulary acquisition and
translation caused by several common types of terminological non-equivalence, including “lacunas”
(terms that are not lexicalized in L2), culture-specific terms, semantically complex lexical items, and
differences in connotation. It touches upon the issue of decoding metaphorical concepts and different
types of abbreviations, such as initialisms, acronyms, clippings, and blends.
Next, the authors discuss the rationale of using scaffolding tools for vocabulary activities and exercises
for expansion, including lexical networks, graphic organizers, concept maps, content clues,
substitution tables, etc. Scaffolding techniques could be used to develop terminological competence,
as they help students to process information about almost all aspects of a term (definition, meaning,
collocations of the term, its translation equivalents, the synonyms, hyponyms, antonyms and other
types of semantic relations) and should feed back to all the stages in the flipped learning experience.
The results of students’ terminological competence assessments have cast light on the degree to
which the various term-knowledge aspects are captured. The findings confirm a positive effect of the
flipped classroom approach on students’ terminological knowledge as well as their motivation to
extend ESP learning beyond class through collaborative activities and autonomous research.
Keywords: flipped learning, terminological competence, English for specific purposes

1 INTRODUCTION
Combining face-to-face classroom practices with computer-mediated activities has been one of the
most commonly employed teaching methodologies in the context of Russian higher education for the
past decade. At BMSTU, innovative teachers and lecturers make good use of complementary distance
and blended education in various fields, such as physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering,
robotics, and ESP [1,2,3,4, 5].
The flipped classroom approach to teaching ESP has become especially attractive in the context of
Russian tertiary education due to classroom time limitations, the complexity of technical and semi-
technical vocabulary, and the availability of internet educational resources. This inverted learning
process implies that students learn by watching lectures, reading subject-related articles and carrying
out research outside of class while engaging in class activities through pair work or group work
facilitated by their instructor [6, 7]. Therefore, Bloom’s taxonomy (“Remember, Understand, Apply,
Analyze, Evaluate, Create” [8]) is to be reversed, emphasizing the mastery of higher-order cognitive
skills in class. Studies engaged in flipped learning in ESP classes show some progress approach in
development of productive skills. However, the authors point out that there is not enough evidence
related to student learning outcomes in a flipped classroom versus traditional one [9, 10].
The aim of this paper is to analyze the use of the flipped classroom model in teaching subject-specific
terminology to master’s degree students in the BMSTU Engineering Business and Management
Department. Terminological competence (the ability to use the terminological system in L2 effectively
and appropriately) is the desired goal of an ESP course and is one of the core components of foreign
language professional communicative competence. According to Harding, as with all aspects of ESP
teaching, the needs of the students and the way the ESP vocabulary is applied in their specialism is
crucial [11]. Many of the difficulties of receptive and productive professional language use may result
from inadequate terminology. As well as building and practicing terminological lexis, developing
terminological competence usually involves a number of sub-skills: deducing meaning from context,
understanding appropriate register, considering grammatical behavior, and finding synonyms,
antonyms, hyponyms, and translations equivalents.
In a traditional classroom, when an unknown term appears in a professional discourse and causes a
problem, the language instructor normally gives a lot of attention to it. There are several strategies for
dealing with unknown terminology: description clue, contrast clue, cause and effect clue, synonym
restatement, exemplification, using prefixes, roots, and suffixes, and translation [12, 13].
However, this type of classroom work is time-consuming and leaves almost no time for solving higher-
order cognitive tasks. In a flipped classroom, students are asked to deal with content-based material
outside of the class, and, therefore, the students supposedly need to learn how to get the gist by
predicting, making use of the words that are familiar to them, and ignoring or guessing the meaning of
the unknown words. Thus, students take more responsibility for how they learn new terms while
teachers can focus on the preparation of interactive vocabulary practice activities.
The present study is organized around four aspects:
1) selecting materials for outside-of-class preparation and placing them online;
2) highlighting challenges in terminology and specialist vocabulary acquisition;
3) using effective scaffolding tools for in-class vocabulary activities and after-class extended
learning;
4) carrying out students’ terminological competence assessment.
2 METHODOLOGY
This study was undertaken in three modules of the same ESP course for students of the Engineering
Business and Management Department at BMSTU. The flipped learning experience involved 46
attending students and lasted for three months during the first semester of their ESP course. Prior to
the Masters degree course, the learners have completed a three year ESP course studying for their
Bachelors degree.
The students were informed that this part of the course combined classroom activities with distance
learning and that the process would take place in reversed order.

The course covered three interrelated thematic units (Sources of Innovation, Innovation and the
Development Process, and Feasibility Studies) and included diverse lexical material. The learning
material was created in accordance with the following distance education and ESP learning principles:
1) compatibility of the materials—lectures, interviews, business articles and documents—with the
official curriculum and the ESP course requirements;
2) an integrated lexical approach to teaching terminology and special vocabulary through
developing skills such as reading, writing, listening, critical thinking, presentations, etc.;
3) full coverage of each of the key issues related to the subject, i.e., the principal aspects of
innovation management processes, concepts and models for innovation management, the life cycle of
an innovation, etc.;
4) authentic materials, including various types of professional discourse—lectures and
presentations, podcasts, graphs, diagrams, statistics in charts, and relevant articles;
5) application of corpora and online dictionaries for term extraction, bilingual term extraction and
automatic concordance generation, which are invaluable tools to retrieve relevant information and
quickly understand how a term or collocation is used in a business context;
6) a flexible learner-centered model that creates individual meaningful learning opportunities and
allows students to choose vocabulary learning strategies and revision activities according to their
types of memory, speech imitation abilities, or visual perception skills.
The traditional ESP course was reversed, with most of the content delivery moved to Moodle, the
online learning platform and course management system. Examples of input included digital
innovation and business model presentations, websites promoting research and innovation, podcasts,
lectures and talks on innovation and technology management, graphics, charts, and diagrams. These
instruments were used to cover key facts and concepts from the discipline topics, thereby giving the
students a start for when they meet the same points again in their faculty work. The instructors were
able to follow the progress of the students studying and record statistics on their performance.
Several scaffolding tools were available for vocabulary activities. The learners were asked to create
mind maps for the topic “Innovation management typologies,” find and practice examples of
terminology use in a text, and create and organize their own personal vocabulary lists. Furthermore,
links to SketchEngine, a language corpus management and query system, provided the students
hands-on experience using corpora through guided tasks or concordance lines.
English-Russian corpora were used to extract terms in two languages simultaneously and display
terminology lists. Supplementary vocabulary exercises were used to identify the lexical features of
different registers and styles, to practice typical abbreviations, acronyms and blends of the specialism,
and practice word-building.
Moreover, Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus, an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word
maps, was used to equip the learners with the specialist vocabulary they need to participate
successfully in classroom activities.
The second stage took place in the classroom and involved several scaffolding tools. They were used
to establish what students didn’t understand and highlight some useful terminology to support their
active participation in discussions related to the topics. Active learning strategies, e.g., problem-based
learning, were used to deal with complex projects, such as comparing various features regarding
innovation management tools.
The third stage had to do with assessing terminological competence and investigating the students’
opinions of some components of the flipped classroom model. Data were gathered from the students’
achievements in four terminological competence assessment tests and their responses to the survey
on their engagement in the process of flipped learning.
The tests were based on the following tasks: matching the terms with their definitions and choosing
the best terms to complete the sentences; decoding abbreviations and defining terminological
collocations; translating the terms or chunk in the context (from English into Russian); and using a
scale to self-assess business vocabulary knowledge. Each test included 30 lexical items denoting
economic concepts. In the first three tests, the respondents were given one point for each correct
answer. In the final test, the learners were asked to use the scale (0-3) to give themselves scores for
each target item (Table 1). The learners’ indications of 2 and 3 scores for each item were considered
to be a sufficient equivalent of the ‘correct’ answer. If the terms were familiar to them, the students

were asked to define them or write a word (expression) with a similar meaning, or use the terms in the
sentences of their own.
Table 1. Target terminological items: vocabulary knowledge self-assessment
The level of terminological
competence
Score
I don’t know this term 0
I’ve come across this term, but I
don’t remember what it means
1
I understand the term when I see
or hear it in a sentence, but I don’t
know how to use it
2
I know the term 3
The target terms were chosen according to the thematic units, and Henrickson’s three dimensions of
vocabulary assessment were used to consider the possible lexical aspects:
1. the degree of mastery that the test attempts to measure;
2. the degree to which the various business term-knowledge aspects are captured; and
3. a focus on receptive and productive knowledge [13].
Finally, the survey was conducted to examine the students’ perceptions of studying ESP in a flipped
manner and their opinions on the practicability of this model for learning subject-specific terminology.
Participation in this part of the course was optional.
3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
3.1 Students’ participation in flipped classrooms
Results show that the students’ participation in the first online part of flipped classroom activities was
rather active, and most of them (n=39, 85%) carried out some content-based activities (i.e., watched
lectures, read articles, listened to podcasts, etc.); many of them (n=27, 59%) used online sources for
vocabulary work. Some students (n=7, 15%) did not engage with the approach and have not carried
out any activity. Generally, participation in the flipped classroom activities was affected by academic
performance and language proficiency levels. Most of the low-performing students showed almost no
interest in flipped learning.
3.2 Assessment of terminological competence
The results of business vocabulary tests were evaluated according to several criteria. The main
evaluation parameters were the overall test scores of the students and the average of scores. When
analyzing the test results, we also considered the percentage of terms known to all students—a
criterion that allowed the elicitation of students’ knowledge and identification of major challenges in
vocabulary acquisition (Table 2).
The first assignment (matching and multiple choice) was performed by the respondents with an
average score of 83%, and the second one (decoding and defining) with a score of 65%. A large
number of students tested saw the task of translating the terms and chunks in the context as
challenging. The scores indicated that they were familiar with only a small range of Russian
equivalents which might be a limiting factor in developing their professional competence. Though the
learners’ indications of 2 and 3 scores for each item were considered to be a sufficient equivalent of
the ‘correct’ answer, there was a tendency for some participants to overestimate their terminological
competence. Almost half of the participants (n=24) failed to define the terms, write a word (expression)
with a similar meaning, or use the terms in the sentences of their own

Table 2. Results of four 30-item business vocabulary tests
Range of scores Average of scores % of terms known to
all students (their
correct answers)
Matching the
terms with their
definitions and
choosing the
best term
70 – 96 % 83 % 40 %
Decoding
abbreviations
and defining
terminological
collocations
45 – 80 % 65 % 35%
Translating the
term or chunk
in the context
20 – 75 % 52 % 28 %
Using a scale
to assess
business
vocabulary
knowledge
30 – 97 % 74 % 40 %
Findings demonstrate that specialized vocabulary acquisition present a number of challenges due to
the differences in structural and semantic characteristics of L1 and L2 terminological systems. The
language of these business areas uses a variety of genres and styles, terms borrowed from
specialized technical fields, abbreviations (R&D, CRM, TQM), acronyms (SWOT, SCAMPER), blends
(e-tailing, e-lancing, edutainment, infomercial), collocations with compound attributes (computer-aided
design, decision-making greed), and a large number of metaphors and idiomatic expressions
(brainstorming, technology scouting, decision gates). Apart from the possible difference in the
expressive meaning, such lexical units cause major difficulties in acquisition by Russian students
because their metaphoric meanings were established in a foreign language and the underlying
associations and comparisons may be unclear to them.
Translation challenges are believed to be linked with the problem of non-equivalence [14]. Non-
equivalence means that the target language has no direct equivalent for a word or a phrase in the
source language. Some common types of non-equivalence caused by lacunas (terms not lexicalised in
Russian, such as delayering, absenteeism, roadshow, stagflation) are being increasingly filled in with
English loan words. Other examples of non-equivalence include terms with a broader meaning in L1
(feasibility study) or some distinctions in the meaning of translational counterparts, which lead to
lexical discrepancy. In this case, a common problem, which constitutes a real area of difficulty that
Russian students encounter with business vocabulary, is that a Russian lexeme has two or more
counterparts (amortization/depreciation, effective/efficient).
Moreover, a Russian language term may have the same denotation as the source language word, but
it may not possess same emotional connotation (rainmakers, sunrise industries). The difference may
be subtle, but important enough to pose a problem for students in a given context.
The practical problem-solving approach to teaching non-equivalent terminological vocabulary to ESP
students is to translate by paraphrasing on the base of super-ordinate or related terms. Translations by
means of loan words and calqued lexemes when they occur for the first time should be supplemented
by explanations, descriptions and illustrations to convey the terms’ precise meanings.
A large number of scaffolding techniques (lexical networks, graphic organizers, concept maps, content
clues, substitution tables) could be used to develop terminological competence as it helps students to

process information on almost all aspects of knowing a term. Such exercises for expansion are
supposed to feed back to all the stages in the flipped learning experience. Once they are explained, it
is possible to use lexical borrowings or loan translations and on their own, for reasons of language
economy.
As for the culture-specific vocabulary, this may be a fruitful area for comparisons with the student’s first
culture and target economic patterns. In this case, the foreign language instructors may help the
students to create bridges from one cognitive system to another.
3.3 Students’ perceptions of the flipped classroom model
The learners indicated the following benefits of the flipped classroom (some examples of the students’
comments are given in brackets):
1) learning at their own individual pace (“We can read the articles and watch the videos several
times if we don’t understand something”);
2) flexibility of the modular structure (“You can dip in and out, download audio for on-the-go
learning);
3) better understanding of the content due to their advance preparation (“Seeing and hearing
new terms before the lesson is really helpful because classroom time isn't enough for
understanding and practicing new words”);
4) paying more attention to the terminology and noticing its features (“We can find all
explanations of vocabulary and the information about typical word combinations online, put
them in practice in relation to our professional situations in class.”)
5) more activities to revise and practice professional language and develop their professional
skills (“We have a chance to carry out some projects and discuss case studies related to our
specialism. This is more meaningful than just learning new words.”).
However, several students complained, that instead of having their in-class and home assignments
shifted, they felt added workload, as they spent a lot of time on the pre-class work. One of them
mentioned, that investigating vocabulary problems online took more time than it would normally take in
class. For many low performing students authentic texts seemed far too often too long and overloaded
with terminology.
The participants suggested, that the pre-class part of the course should take between 1 and 2 hours of
online work with a possibility of after-classroom extra activities. Other recommendations included a
more detailed guidance on each topic and full answer keys for vocabulary practice exercises.
4 CONCLUSIONS
Although the empirical evidence of the study is not sufficient for drawing conclusions about the
learning outcomes in a flipped classroom, the data obtained may assist university language instructors
in teaching English for professional communication and contribute to the new design of an ESP
syllabus targeted at developing the professional communicative competence of engineering business
and management specialists.
The flipped classroom model provides a lot of opportunities to design courses using active learning to
develop students’ terminological competence. Students are able to select online assignments that
appeal to their ESP proficiency and cognitive level, rather than being made to do the same vocabulary
exercises as everyone else. Because classroom time is freed up for problem-based and case-based
learning, instructors can also be more creative providing useful practice for a wide variety of
vocabulary structures and functions.
Some practical recommendations may include introducing students to using online sources for
terminology analysis and ESP vocabulary work, such as corpora and visual thesauri. They could be
used to help students consider how useful terminology is in their professional area and make their own
choices on what terminology to work on.

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