Flipped classrooms

Read the Electric Educator and his story on the traditions of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. What strange ways to organize, but it had become a tradition and changing this would have been 'novel', pardon the pun.
But it is 'novel' that makes practical sense to any organisation, if it makes programming run smooth.
Jon Bergmann wrote in here in The Daily Riff about The Flipped Class. Also here Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann

Constantly flipped family member of mine, an acrobat by trade!

Which brings me to the novel idea:

Would this work in the ESL classroom?

The idea of a flipped classroom where the content is delivered on line prior to the lesson to reserve the time spent for classroom instruction on the solving, discovering, learning part of the lesson would only work for people with the skills gained through higher education.
In the case of refugees in Australia, many of our students arriving through the humanitarian refugee process, often have not had the schooling and educational opportunities we, here in Oz take for granted. I look at my primary school aged child doing worksheets, homework tasks and even understanding the taskrequired, and this can be pitched at a very high level, and often with assessment marking rubric attached.. Learning strategies are taught in prep and all the way through our education (K-12). Repetition and layout, display, presentation, expectations of achievement are progressively more and more complex.
It would only work in the higher levels where English is understood and used fully as the classroom instructional tool. (as opposed to mime, role play, repetitive wording, card games, images, interactions-more popular at basic beginner levels).
So for higher intermediate, yes this would be an option, as long as all students had access to the vodcast prior to the lesson it was based on.
In reality, I think the flipped classroom is a long way off yet, in this case.