Flipped Classroom
Flipped Classroom
2, October 2021
Abstract
The primary focus of this study was to examine the effects of flipped classrooms
on students’ academic achievement in legal English learning context at Hanoi
Law University. To achieve the aim, fifty second-year students participating in the
study were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. The
experimental group was taught legal English with the flipped learning approach
while traditional teaching method was applied to the control group. A pre-test and
a post-test were administered to both groups to measure the impacts of flipped
classrooms on students’ academic achievement in legal English. The results
revealed that there were statistically significant differences in the means of the
achievement test attributed to teaching methods in favour of the experimental
groups. Also, survey questionnaires were administered to the students in the
experimental group to identify their perceptions of the application of flipped
classrooms on their legal English learning performance. The data showed that the
majority of the students considered flipped classroom to be effective. It is hoped
that the findings encourage instructors of English to use modern teaching
strategies, in particular, flipped classroom strategy to improve the English
teaching and learning process.
Introduction
In recent years, language teaching methods have witnessed rapid changes in
finding out new approaches to enhance the effectiveness of the language
acquisition process. Such approaches make learners become the center of learning
process. It is undeniable that learning environment and teaching methods with the
support of technology prove to be of great importance in helping each student
learn and reach the language proficiency level. One of such modern methods and
strategies is the application of the flipped classroom model, known as the inverted
or reversed classroom. Flipped classroom is an unconventional model in which
students gain first-exposure learning prior to class and focus on the processing
part of learning such as synthesizing, analyzing, problem-solving in class
(Bergmann & Sams, 2012).
In the literature, there has been a number of research on the effects of the
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Academic achievement
Khatib & Tarawneh (2002) denoted that academic achievement refers to the
proficiency of skills and knowledge of the student on a specific subject after the
course. Additionally, with the help of measurement methods such as oral or
written exams and assignment, the academic achievement can measure the ability
of student to understand the subject matters and to apply them in carrying out the
required tasks or projects. In this study, the academic achievement is measured by
scores that students get in the achievement test prepared by the researcher at the
end of the learning course.
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Method
Participants
The study was carried out in the context of advanced legal English course at
Hanoi Law University. 50 legal English major juniors – the population of this
study, whose age ranged from 21 to 23, were divided equally into experimental
group and control group. It was determined that students were between the
intermediate level and upper-intermediate level of English proficiency. Moreover,
it should be noted that those participants were required to finish two basic legal
English courses before advanced legal English one.
Procedures
The experiment was carried out in advanced legal English course for 15
weeks, each of which lasts for 135 minutes. Before the treatment, students in both
groups were required to do a legal English test including reading, listening and
writing skills relating to different areas of law. At the beginning of the treatment,
the instructor (researcher) explained the design of the lesson, the goals and the
content of the application of flipped classroom model to the experimental group.
During the treatment, the students in the experimental group were asked to listen
to the video lectures at home, all of which were designed and recorded by the
teacher. At class time, the experimental group were given time for questions and
discussion on both the content as well as the meaning and the use of legal terms in
different areas of law. Specifically, for advanced learning course, learners were
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Table 2 showed the results of paired samples t-test analysis for the pre-test
and post-test scores of the control group. According to the Table 3, there was a
difference between pre-test (M=5.904, SD=0.52321) and post-test (M=7.364,
SD=0.51796) scores of the control group in terms of overall legal English skills
performance. From the statistics, the adoption of the traditional method in the
control group had an effect on ESP students’ legal English performance.
However, it was not considered as significant.
Table 3. Paired samples pre-test and post - test Statistics – Experimental group
Mean N Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean
Pre-test Experimental5.760 25 .3452 .0690
group 8.536 25 .6940 .1388
Post-test Experimental
group
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Research question 2: What are the students’ attitudes towards flipped classroom
model?
As can be seen from the table 6, flipped classroom model is not familiar to
almost students with 88% of surveyed participants admitted having no prior
experience of it. The application of flipped classroom concept in advance legal
English course is quite new to them.
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mean of 3.68 to 4.32. This statistic showed that the application of flipped
classroom is beneficial to students’ learning in terms of raising motivation,
autonomy and responsibility and language proficiency.
Regarding the difficulties when applying flipped classroom model, most of
the students surveyed agreed that they felt more stressful and had problems in
using electronic devices with the mean of 3.88 and 3.32 respectively. Moreover,
half of students in experimental group felt confused about activating the provided
classroom materials.
In general, the students expressed a positive attitude towards the application
of flipped classroom with the high mean ranging from 3.32 to 4.32 (strongly agree
(5) to “strongly disagree” (1)).
Discussion
This study aimed to investigate the differences between the students’
academic achievement of the experimental group applied flipped classroom model
and the control group taught by the traditional method as well as and to identify
students’ views in the experimental group towards the flipped classroom. The data
from the pre-test, post- test and survey questionnaires were then gathered and
analyzed through the SPSS program. The statistics indicated important main
findings.
Concerning the first research question, the results of the post-test revealed
that students in the experimental group were significantly better at their academic
achievement in legal English than those who received the traditional method
instruction in the control group. From the statistics, it can be seen that the current
study shares similar findings with the previous ones such as the studies carried out
by ALzwekh (2014) and Almusawi (2014) on the impact of flipped classroom
model on both content and language teaching and learning in comparison with the
traditional teaching method. Those studies pointed out a variety of
recommendations, including: the need to encourage the university instructors to
use the flipped classroom strategy and holding seminars, courses, and training
workshops on applying the flipped classroom strategy.
In response to the second research question, survey questionnaires were
administered in order to examine students’ views on the flipped classroom
strategy. The results showed that the majority of the participants expressed their
positive attitudes towards the flipped classroom application in legal English
course. Most of the statements received a high rate of agreement among the
participants with the high mean ranging from 3.32 to 4.32. This study shared
similar findings with other studies (Hung, 2015; Moffett (2014); Tune et al
(2013), indicating that the students were motivated self-learning environment,
engagement in class activities and responsibility in learning. However, the
negative effects of flipped classroom concerning the problems in having, using the
technology as well as increasing the stress level received the high rate of
agreement with the mean of more than 3.00.
Flipped classroom is such an effective instructional technique that its
application affects students’ autonomy in learning process. This finding was
consistent with the previous studies, which indicate that students gain higher
autonomy in flipped classroom (Benson & Voller, 2014; Chen, 2017; Zainuddin
& Perera, 2017; Han, 2015). This is probably because the flipped classroom
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Conclusion
The study demonstrated the positive effects of the flipped classroom model
on students’ academic achievement, which was shown by much higher scores of
the post-test than the pre-test. In addition, the students in the experimental group
expressed their satisfaction on the application of flipped classroom in terms of
different criteria. However, there are several limitations to the current study.
Firstly, the factors including the age, gender of the participants, which were not
taken into consideration in this study, can be used in further studies to investigate
whether they neutralize the effects of the flipped classroom model on students’
academic performance or not. Secondly, the size of the participants in this study is
rather small. The results, to some extent, cannot reflect the behavior of a larger
population. Therefore, a greater number of participants should be involved in
future studies to increase the generalization of findings. Lastly, the study only
investigated the effect of flipped classroom model on students’ academic
achievement during a 15-week course, not specifically the performance of
separate sub-skills including listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. In
order to have a detailed insight into the usefulness of the flipped classroom
application, further research should be carried out to measure the degree of its
impact on those sub-skills over a longer period of time.
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