The Effectiveness Of Flipped English Classroom On EFL Learners' Reading Comprehension At Senior High Schools

With the advent of information communication technology(ICT),educators in the 21 st century are constantly adopting new technologies and pedagogies.Hoping to maximize learning through providing personalized instruction with flexibility in scheduling,assignments,and pacing,the idea of flipping the classroom has received increasing attention from educators.The last decade witnessed the emergence and expansion of the flipped classroom and a large volume of studies have been conducted with regards to the effects of flipped classroom on learner's academic achievements.Up to now,most of the previous studies investigated the effectiveness of the flipped classroom in STEM disciplines,such as science,technology,engineering,and mathematics,while few have been conducted in humanities disciplines,and those related to learning a second or foreign language in the Chinese context were scarce.In order to fill this gap,the present study served as an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of the flipped classroom instruction on Chinese EFL learners' reading comprehension performance in comparison with the traditional lecture-based instruction,and to detect whether the flipped classroom instruction affects EFL learners' with different proficiency levels similarly.The participants were 103 tenth graders at a senior high school in the city of Foshan,Guangdong province.They were from two parallel classes,of which one was randomly selected as the control group and the other the experimental group.The control group received the traditional teaching method while the experimental group were exposed to the flipped classroom method,where videos were assigned to students for self-learning outside the classroom and interactive group learning activities were organized inside the classroom.A pretest-posttest research design was adopted to detect the difference in participants' learning outcomes.The pre-test of reading comprehension and the post-test were same in the format but different in the content.The major findings of the present study are as follows:(1)Compared with the control group,participants from the experimental group obtained statistically significant higher marks in the post-test.Considering there was no significant difference in the pre-test marks between the two groups,it could be concluded that the flipped English classroom did result in better reading performance than traditional method;(2)Within the experimental group,a significant improvement was detected in the post-test marks for both the preliminary and lower-intermediate learners but not the upper-intermediate learners.(3)The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference in the increased scores between the preliminary and lower-intermediate learners.Therefore,it can be concluded that the preliminary learners benefited the most in the process of applying the FC technique.The findings of the present study contribute to the literature about flipped classroom by expanding the application of flipped classroom technique into the EFL classroom in the Chinese context,suggesting this pedagogical model has the potential for transforming the traditional lecture-based pedagogy into more effective flipped classroom.Regarding that flipped classroom instruction does not affect EFL learners' with different proficiency levels similarly,the probable reason is that the less proficient learners might adopt more learning strategies compared to the higher proficient learners.