Flip and synchronous literacy learning

Students are exposed to many and varied types of literacy in university study in different disciplines. To build competence in critical literacy, they need enough time to read and analyse printed or digitized materials like videos and audio scripts. This is often being seen as one of the key factors to allow students to build cognitive and linguistic competence. The flipped classroom is an appropriate learning environment in which students have time to explore, reflect on and be critical of the information and language being used. Second, the use of digital devices in the classroom can better engage students of the twenty-first century. This paper discusses how teaching faculty deploy the flipped-classroom approach in teaching so that students have plenty of opportunities to prepare as they review different types of learning materials in advance and have real time to further practise skills in reading, listening, speaking and writing with mobile devices in the classroom. As critical literacy refers to examining the underlying meaning beyond the decoding of the basic understanding of the content, students can make use of the multimodal medium to express their interpretations. Issues in deploying critical literacy using the flipped classroom approach are to be discussed, and recommendations are made.