Article Preview
TopIntroduction
The search for the most efficient and effective instruction methods is usually at the forefront of teachers’ minds, regardless of the subjects being taught in their classrooms. In language education, and especially in English as a foreign language (EFL) environments, the efficiency and effectiveness of teaching methods are of particular importance as students have fewer opportunities to experience the target language first-hand. Therefore, teachers need to consider techniques to reduce the amount of classroom time in which the teacher is merely talking at the students and increase the amount of time in which students can be actively involved in discussions, debates, and conversations. One method that achieves this and has received much attention over the past decade is flipped learning.
In a nutshell, flipped learning is a teaching methodology in which lectures and textbook explanations, traditionally performed by the teacher in front of the classroom with students listening, are recorded and made available to students via online video sharing websites, such as YouTube®. During class time, practice exercises and assignments, that students usually complete at home in a regular classroom, are completed under the teacher’s direct guidance (Alvarez, 2011; Moravec et al., 2010). Because the amount of class time spent with the teacher explaining the textbook is kept to a minimum in the flipped classroom, more opportunities for students to actively participate in discussions are available. This creates classes focused on the students and their needs rather than being centered around the teachers and the chalkboard.
There is no clear record regarding the birth of the flipped classroom method. Even though a specific terminology was not given to describe this teaching method at the time, Mazur (1997), and later Crouch and Mazur (2001), reported on physics classes in which students were given lecture notes a week before the actual lectures. Because students had already read the lecture notes beforehand, the majority of the designated class time could be spent concentrating on discussions, with the lecture notes being viewed as guides to assist students as they prepared for each lesson. Some academics suggest the flipped classroom concept originated from the work of Lage et al. (2000) with their suggestion of the inverted classroom. This approach to teaching, coined classroom flip by Baker (2000), has enabled teachers and students to take learning beyond the time and physical limits of the classroom, setting the tone for educators in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
The modern flipped classroom, which makes use of the creative benefits of Web 2.0, is often formulated from the advice of Bergmann and Sams (2012). Since then, this method, which now focused on providing students with guided preparation for class by using pre-recorded explanations of lesson content, has been highly regarded by countless instructors and widely investigated by researchers on a global scale. One of the most well-known examples of a lecture site often used for flipped classrooms is the series of instructional videos made available online by Khan Academy. Such an approach to education emphasizes that all people learn and concentrate in different ways and at different times (Khan, 2012).
Although many studies support the flipped learning method as one that effectively increases students’ motivation and proficiency in language learning, there is little research that considers whether or not flipped learning is indeed beneficial for all students, regardless of individual factors such as motivation, language aptitude, or perceived proficiency. In this paper, I focus on the final of these factors, and whether or not the degree of a student’s linguistic self-confidence can indicate their eelings about studying under the flipped learning method.