EFL Learners’ Attitudes Toward Flipped Teaching and Its Effect on Their Oral Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency

Abstract

The flipped teaching has nowadays become a new movement in teaching and is getting pervasive in the educational system. The goal of this study was to explore if there was any significant difference between L2 learners’ oral complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in flipped and traditional classes. To do so, both traditional and filpped classes were resorted to in order to see which class matched the students’ needs. Moreover, this study was done to find out if it had any significant effect on the learners’ motivation, self-efficacy, engagement, self-confidence, and autonomy. Via an OPT, 40 homogenous, lower-intermediate students were chosen from a language school in Isfahan, Iran. Then, they were randomly assigned to experimental 1 and 1 control groups. Initially, all the students attended an interview session and their responses were audio-recorded; then, 2 teachers scored their responses to make certain the interviews enjoyed reliability. Afterward, the students took a pretest with 2 questions relevant to their actual life and the grammar they would acquire in the course of the treatment. After taking 4 treatment sessions, the students received a posttest to see how much they had progressed during the 4 treatment sessions. Also, a questionnaire was adapted from another study to figure out the students’ satisfaction regarding this type of teaching. The results revealed that the flipped class increased the students’ motivation, self-efficacy, engagement, self-confidence, and autonomy. However, no significant difference was seen between the learners in the flipped class and those in the traditional class, as far as oral CAF was concerend. Based on the students’ answers to the questionnaire, most were satisfied with the flipped model. To conclude, materials developers and syllabus designers should modify instructional materials and books taught in language schools and add some parts to them in line witth technology to satisfy digital natives.

Keywords

• complexity
• accuracy
• and fluency (caf)
• digital natives
• flipped vs. traditional classrooms