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Generally, teachers play a primary role in lecturing in the traditional university education in China, because lecturing is the main teaching method. Teachers’ off-line lectures are the primary source of students’ knowledge. This form of teaching has been widely studied in different aspects. Some researchers (McCarthy & Anderson, 2000) have reached the conclusion that lecturing may lead to students’ passive knowledge acquisition because of their superficial processing of information. Recently, the pedagogical trend has been promoting the idea of student-centeredness. Among the different student-centered learning pedagogies, flipped instruction, which was first introduced in 2012 by Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams, has been paid much attention to and enjoyed a growing amount of popularity. However, due to the teaching and learning context in China, the test-based education system usually leads English teachers to primarily adopt teacher-centered and exam-oriented instruction (Mermelstein, 2015; Samir, et. al., 2020; Zhong, 2019). This explains why flipped learning studies on English acquisition conducted in China commonly demonstrate that many students state that learning becomes challenging when getting accustomed to flipped learning, which was not as secure and comfortable as compared with teacher-centered learning (Hao, 2016; Chen Hsieh, Wu, & Marek, 2017). Qualitative studies on flipped learning in this context are limited, so a greater understanding of students’ learning performance in the flipped context is useful for educators.
In flipped learning, students have access to their learning content out of the class and discuss it with partners or apply the out-of-class acquired knowledge to the new content in the in-class activities. The new inverted learning approach has aroused researchers’ interest in exploring its effects on learning. Up to now, scholars (Day & Foley, 2006; Ruddick, 2012; Azamat, et. al., 2018) have conducted empirical experiments investigating students’ positive perceptions of the approach and their challenges encountered in the process of its implementation (Talbert, 2012; Teimzit, et. al., 2019). Besides, the advantages of flipped learning (Adnan, 2017; Sletten, 2017; Tokmak, et. al., 2019; Zhong & Qing, 2019) have been broadly explored, among which the definite advantages such as learners’ learning flexibility and self-control over their learning pace have commonly been found. In order to gain the desired learning outcomes, students, guided by their own self-control of learning pace, commonly employ metacognitive strategies to monitor and regulate learning, such as deciding on the time, the place and the way they should handle the learning materials (Joao, et. al., 2018; Yilmaz & Baydas, 2017; Manganello, et. al. 2021).