An Experimental Study On The Impacts Of Flipped Classroom On Adult College Students' English Learner Autonomy

The cultivation of learner autonomy has long been the focus among front-line teachers and scholars.In addition,Flipped Classroom is a teaching model which combines information technology and education.Both of them are consistent with the student-centered education philosophy.This study endeavors to address the following two research questions:1)what are the impacts of Flipped Classroom on adult college students' English learner autonomy?2)what are the reasons for the impacts of Flipped Classroom on adult college students' English learner autonomy?The current research is an experimental study.A teaching experiment on Flipped Classroom was conducted and it lasted for one semester,from February to June of 2017.Two parallel classes with similar English learner autonomy in the College of Extended Education of X University in Zhejiang,all together 112 freshmen,are selected as research participants.The experimental class(EC)adopts Flipped Classroom while the controlled class(CC)uses traditional model to investigate impacts of Flipped Classroom on English learner autonomy and reasons for the impacts.The instruments of this study include questionnaires,interview and classroom observation.What's more,independent-sample t-test and paired-sample t-test are conducted by SPSS 21.0 to deal with the data collected from questionnaires.This study finds out that 1)Flipped Classroom can significantly improve adult college students' English learner autonomy.The results show,before the experiment,the difference in English learner autonomy between EC and CC is not significant(p=0.743>0.05).However,after one term's teaching practice,the mean score of English learner autonomy in EC increases by 5.679,while the increase in CC is only 0.607.What's more,the difference between EC and CC in post-test is significant(p = 0.037<0.05).Specifically,after the experiment,compared with students in CC,students in EC have more explicit learning purposes(p = 0.000<0.05),can plan their learning better(p = 0.021<0.05)and can study more effectively by using learning strategies(p = 0.003<0.05).The results of interviews and classroom observation are consistent with the results of quantitative data;2)by analyzing the interview results,three instructional strategies adopted under Flipped Classroom are concluded to explain the impacts:the objective-guided learning,the self-directed planning and the strategy-based instruction.This study attempts to provide an effective teaching model to foster adult college students' English learner autonomy.The results of the experiment indicate Flipped Classroom can effectively promote adult college students' English learner autonomy and thus offer an empirical reference to future research.