An Empirical Study Of Applying Flipped Class In English Academic Writing Calss Of Engineering Students

Flipped class has received increasing attention from Chinese scholars since 2012.However,there are relatively few studies focusing on the flipped class of academic English writing for engineering students.From March to June of 2017,the researcher conducted a study comparing of the flipped teaching approach and a class of the traditional teaching approach.Students in these two classes were sophomores majoring in Telecommunications Engineering with Management at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.This study aims to answer the following three research questions:1)Which is more effective in improving students'academic English writing ability,the traditional academic writing class or the flipped academic writing class?2)What are students'perceptions of flipped teaching approach?3)What are the common writing mistakes made by students in the flipped class?This study adopted a combined method of qualitative research and quantitative research.First,pre-test data and post-test data of the two classes were collected and compared.Second,in the end of June,2017,all the 113 students participated in the questionnaire investigation and 13 of them were interviewed in a semi-structured way.Questionnaire data were analyzed with SPSS 22.0.Reliability analysis,descriptive analysis,independent sample t-test and Pearson correlation were conducted.Third,the frequency of 11 common mistakes in the English academic papers was determined.Three conclusions were drawn from the discussion.First of all,compared to the traditional class,the flipped class helped the students improve their English academic writing ability significantly.Moreover,students hold positive views towards flipped class and in-class activities.Finally,among the 11 common mistakes in writing academic paper,"Configuration","Word Choice","Word Form" and "Preposition" are the top four mistakes with highest frequency.Pedagogical suggestion is that teachers should combine flipped class and different subjects coherently to make it more effective in the future teaching and research.