Enhancing beginner learners’ oral proficiency in a flipped Chinese foreign language classroom

ABSTRACT

Flipped instruction has become a hot issue in foreign language teaching technology. In this study, we tracked learners in a beginner-level Chinese Foreign Language classroom to see if flipped teaching based on a MOOC made a difference to their oral proficiency development and rate of progresscompared to a baseline group. Language developmentwas assessed by standard complexity, accuracy and fluency measures, alongside subjective ratings. Learners’ investment of time and perceptions of the new method were also investigated. Results showed that learners exposed to flipped instruction significantly (p < .01) outperformed the baseline group in oral proficiency in many measures, especially in speech fluency, though their advantage in complexity and accuracy was less evident. Rate of progress through the syllabus for the flipped group was also faster, requiring 25% less face-to-face time. Learners in the flipped group also demonstrated more (out of class) time investment in their learning and more positive attitudes toward the course, though these two factors did not significantly associate with the proficiency measures. These results support the implementation of flipped instruction in foreign language classrooms for both better and faster learner improvement; we explore how far psycho-social models of active learning might explain its methodological advantages.

KEYWORDS:

• Flipped classroom
• Chinese L2 oral proficiency
• MOOC
• foreign language teaching

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Special thanks go to Prof. Helen Shen and Prof. Chuanren Ke for their advice on revision.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Learners’ investment’ can have different meanings in different paradigms. Limited by research condition, in this study only learners’ self-reported time investment out of class was measured. The same measurement was taken by another study on flipped instruction for foreign language (Hung, 2015). We assume this can at least make the two studies comparable.

2. Unlike most college level EFL classes, CFL classes in China often includes lots of ‘true’ zero beginners. For the current study, all 82 participants took a placement test together with 200+ other learners at the beginning of the semester. The placement test had a written part (at the difficulty level of HSK 1/very easy) and an oral part (also very basic). Learners were told not to guess any of the questions (since they were all in the multiple choice form) if they don't understand the questions in the written test. The 82 learners all received 0 percent in the written test and could produce nothing more than greeting words like ‘ni3hao3’ (hello) in the oral test, and were therefore randomly placed in the two beginners’ classes involved in this study. Other learners with higher proficiency were all placed in different (more advanced) classes.

3. The 31 learners were from 21 countries and with 18 different first languages respectively, as shown in the following list in the format of ‘Nationality (first language/number of learners if multiple)’: Pakistan (Urdu/4), Italy (Italian/3), US (English/3), France (French/2), Nepal (Nepali/2), Norway (Norwegian/2), Afghanistan (Dari), Bangladesh (Bengali), Canada (English), Chile (Spanish), Denmark (Danish), Ethiopia (Amharic), Hungary (Hungarian), Mongolia (Mongolian), Philippines (Filipino/English), Russia (Russian), Slovakia (Slovak), Spain (Spanish), Sweden (Swedish), Turkey (Turkish), UK (English)

4. The 30 learners were from 20 countries and with 18 different first languages respectively, as shown in the following list in the format of ‘Nationality (first language/number of learners if multiple)’:Pakistan (Urdu/5), France (French/3), Ethiopia (Amharic/2), Nepal (Nepali/2), Tunisia (Arabic/2), US (English/2), Afghanistan (Dari), Algeria (Arabic), Bangladesh (Bengali), Brazil (Portuguese), Czech (Czech), Ecuador (Spanish), Germany (German), India (Hindi), Israel (Hebrew), Mongolia (Mongolian), Netherlands (Dutch), Serbia (Serbian), Turkey (Turkish), UK (English)

5. One may question the extra influence of interactions via online forums upon the result of the study. We argue that, compared to a pure MOOC, flipped learning provides opportunities of direct learner-learner and learner-instructor interaction in the face-to-face phase, which, in current technological conditions, are more efficient than interactions via online forums. In addition, the instructional setting in this study required learners to attend face-to-face classes right after they took the relevant online materials, which left no time for them to reflect on any online interactions, since the latter were not instant communication. Combining these two factors, we assume the potential interaction via forums had little marked influence upon amount of additional interactive exposure and would not therefore confound the results of the experiment. In post hoc interviews, students noted the amount of this kind of online interactions had been negligible for them, and our tracking data suggested it was much less than when compared with those taking the MOOC alone.

6. The auto-grading exercises are matched to the written exercises in the textbook, which means the flipped group had about 10 min in-class time to retake the auto-grading exercises for each lesson (see Table 2). This part was designed to help the flipped learners consolidate the knowledge they absorbed in the online portion and also to eliminate the psychological effect that could be induced by ‘strange blanks in the book’. It should be noted that the precondition of using only 10 minutes for doing these exercises by experimental group was that they were repetitive work for them. The baseline group, though spent less total out-of-class learning time (e.g. 82 vs. 176 min at T1, see Table 6), should have spent much longer than 10 min to complete these exercises after class, since they were all “new” to them, and there was no other assignments than taking those exercises for them (watching course videos would have taken a lot of time for group 1).

7. Typically fluency data are usually calculated either by per second or per minute rates, to ensure comparability. However, other papers justify other ratings, e.g. Du 2013 takes a section out of her recordings of speech samples to represent the point in the task when her speakers were speaking most effectively (i.e. not the early or finishing part of the task), and in another paper the authors present speech rate data rated over a 20-second sample (Wright and Zhang 2014, p. 73) as ‘a sufficiently clear length of run, not confounded by task process, which would be valid and reliable as a measure of speech rate for each participant across all four tasks at both times of assessment’. For the current study, all oral data collected are longer than 50 seconds, but a few are shorter than 60. Therefore, to keep the authenticity of the data, we chose ‘per 50 seconds’ instead of ‘per minute’. Given that this study focused on between group comparison, we assume this will not affect the reliability of analysis. If researchers are to compare these data with data from other studies, we believe multiple our data up to minute-long will be an option.

8. This method has not been used by any other studies in this field, however, it seemed to be the only way to form the 3 general objective indices of complexity, accuracy and fluency, and a general objective score for oral proficiency, which were comparable to subjective measures. We agree that the subjective rating is a more reliable indicator for general proficiency in this study, since it has been used by many studies as well as major foreign language oral proficiency tests, and was therefore used in the GLM analysis while answering RQ3. We believe for the purpose of comparing pedagogical effectiveness of different teaching methods, this way of generating a general objective score can triangulate the findings with subjective measures.

9. We did not assess learners’ start-off motivation for the following reasons: as introduced in the ‘participants’ section, all participants were beginner learners of Chinese and first year graduate students who arrived in China only about one week before the beginning of the study. Their placement into the two groups was randomized. We believe the randomization and similar background should have guaranteed their similar start-off motivation. In addition, a survey on motivation at the beginning of the instruction might raise participants’ awareness of the experiment, hence skew the effect of the instruction (also see the last paragraph in ‘teaching method’ section for the consideration of placebo effect).

10. We believe the large SDs means that different learners show very different learning styles and pace in self-study when given the freedom of arranging their own learning, noted in the qualitative comments in post-hoc interviews. This is the major purpose of flipped instruction, because being able to cater to different learning style/aptitude is its advantage over traditional teaching. We assume the better learning outcomes of the experimental group were partially the result of the above situation. It also reminded us that in the traditional classroom, many learners are forced to follow a pace that does not fit their learning style, and hence may fail to achieve optimal learning outcomes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jun Wang

Jun Wang received the PhD degree in linguistics and applied linguistics from East China Normal University, China, in 2006. He then joined the School of International Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is now an associate professor at the School of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research interests include second language acquisition and Chinese as a second language teaching.

Na An

Na An received the PhD degree in linguistics and applied linguistics from Communication University of China, China, in 2008. She then joined the School of International Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She is now a lecturer at the School of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interests include corpus linguistics and teaching Chinese as a second language.

Clare Wright

Clare Wright gained her PhD degree in second language acquisition at Newcastle University, UK in 2010. She is currently the Director of the MA programs in Linguistics and Language Teaching at the University of Leeds, UK. Clare's research investigates linguistic, cognitive and contextual factors of language development, and implications for teaching, particularly in L2 Mandarin.