Research On Efficacy Of An EFL Flipped Classroom Model In Tertiary Education

Recent technological advances have unlocked new directions for education.Innovative educators or researchers in tertiary education take initiatives to integrate information technology into a traditional pedagogical method,aiming at improving students' learning effectiveness.They seek to create flexible learning environments and enhance the student-centered instruction.Either online learning community or physical classroom setting contributes to students' active learning and the dynamic interaction between students and learning contents,between students with their peers,and between students and teachers.Flipped classroom,as a recently emerged technology-fused instructional method,has gained its popularity across the world.It reverses the order of traditional instruction and renders students watch assigned online videos or read learning materials before class,and replaces the traditional lecture format with active class activities,such as cooperation with peers,problem-based discussion and teacher-student interaction.This kind of integration of direct technology-based individual instruction outside of the class and interactive learning activities in the classroom not only allows students to learn at their own pace by repeated exposure to the learning materials,but also engage students in a motivationally supportive learning environment where their learning is enhanced through cooperating,rather than by merely listening.In Chinese context,traditional English teaching is often troubled with improving students' proficiency in speaking and listening,enhancing their active engagement and fostering their strong critical thinking.The primary cause lies in the instructor's dominance over the classroom which brings about the lack of communication practice and dynamic interaction.Moreover,today's university students are different from prior generations.They are born into a world where technology is ubiquitous.And they have a preference for interactive and experiential learning approaches,and are accustomed to seeking for answers to some question from multiple channels in theprocess of learning.For them,teachers are not the sole way of knowledge obtainment or problem handling.Research shows that they demonstrate their decreased tolerance for traditional lecture-based teaching model.Therefore,it is imperative to apply flipped classroom model into language teaching and learning to meet today's university students' characteristics and needs in the era of internet plus education.The researcher,by reviewing the literature,finds that there is little research on EFL learners' engagement in a multidimensional construct in the application of flipped classroom into language education.And there is noticeable absence of flipped classroom model to guide its implementation in tertiary English teaching.Therefore,the present study,on the basis of Reeve's four-aspect engagement and Bloom's Cognitive taxonomy theory,attempts to design an EFL Flipped Classroom Model.Then,the suggested EFL Flipped Classroom Model is applied to explore its efficacy in improving English learners' multidimensional engagement and academic performance to foster their active learning.To verify the impact of EFL Flipped Classroom Model on students' four-aspect engagement and on their learning outcomes,the researcher takes a university in Shanxi for example to conduct an empirical study for 14 weeks during the first semester of the 2016/2017 academic year.The participants are 103 freshmen,among which 50 students are selected as the experimental group to experience the flipped instruction and the other 53 ones are the control group in the traditional lecture-based classroom.To make sure the experimental and control groups are equivalent,a pretest is given to them at the beginning of the semester before the treatment.In the current study,a mixed research method is employed.Three different tools,such as Posttest,Student Engagement Scale,and interviews,are utilized to collect data.And then the data is analyzed by using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 20.The results indicate that students in the flipped instruction outperform those in traditional classroom in terms of their academic performance.The average grade of the experimental group is higher than that of the control group.And the independent sample T-test shows that there is statistically significant difference between the meanscores of the two groups in the posttest(sig.< 0.05).Moreover,the overall situation of students' four-aspect engagement is positive under the guidance of the suggested EFL Flipped Classroom Model.The means of students' behavioral,agentic,cognitive and emotional engagement are all above 3.0 in a five-point Likert Scale.However,their agentic engagement is relatively the lowest among the four-aspect engagement.More importantly,the current research corroborates that there is statistically significant high positive relationship between students' academic performance and their four-aspect engagement.By using EFL Flipped Classroom Model,students' behavioral,emotional,cognitive and agentic engagements do enhance their active learning,which is conducive to create a more motivationally supportive learning environment and make academic progress and.Thus,the flipped classroom is worth teaching attempts to examine its impact on promoting students' active learning.Meanwhile,the results in the present study provide some theoretical references and practical experiences for English teaching reform in Chinese context.