Flipped classroom in technical English for power engineering students: balancing video-based briefings and in-class speaking practice

Abstract

Ukraine`s ongoing war of defence against russian armed aggression has fundamentally disrupted the rhythms of higher education while simultaneously intensifying the professional demands placed upon engineering graduates, making the methodological reform of Technical English instruction in Ukrainian technical universities a matter of both scholarly and national strategic importance. This article examines the pedagogical potential of the flipped classroom model as applied to Technical English courses for G3 power engineering students, proposing a principled framework for balancing asynchronous video-based briefings with structured in-class speaking practice in ways that are responsive to both the theoretical demands of English for Specific Purposes methodology and the concrete educational realities of wartime Ukraine. The study draws on a six-month pedagogical experiment conducted with 67 undergraduate students of the Faculty of Power Engineering and Electromechanics, divided into experimental and control groups and assessed across three measurement points on six communicative performance dimensions using an adapted CEFR-based oral evaluation rubric. The results demonstrate a substantial and consistent developmental advantage for the experimental group, whose overall mean oral performance score progressed 38.5% at pre-test to 72.1% at post-test, compared with the control group`s more modest progression 38.3% to 51.5% over the same period. The article argues that the decisive factor in this differential is not the video component or the in-class task design considered independently, but the structural coherence of the relationship between them – the purposeful conversion of declarative technical knowledge into procedural communicative competence through repeated cycles of pre-class preparation and in-class activation. The findings extend and contextualise the theoretical positions of leading scholars in flipped learning and ESP research, contributing empirical evidence a setting that the existing literature has not previously addressed. Conclusions point to the flipped classroom not merely as a logistical accommodation to disrupted conditions but as a pedagogically superior architecture for developing the technical communicative competence that Ukraine`s power engineering graduates will require as participants in the international professional and scientific communities central to national reconstruction.