Inverted Grammar Classroom: Detecting Grammar Errors in Student Video Presentations

Introduction

For decades, the higher education system in Malaysia has seen its courses delivered on a standard fourteen weeks of face-to-face lectures and tutorials. This is despite the fact that technology has seen an advancement in providing free flexible access to materials and information. As tradition dictates, a number of hours should be put aside for formal lecture and tutorials. However, as more studies have been conducted on the ineffectiveness of traditional lecture to students’ learning, recently in 2012, MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) has been introduced to the world of academia as a way to engage active learning for students. It serves as an interactive user forums to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants and it is free.

Education today in the globalised world is about adapting to changing world. How and what we teach has to change as well. Learners learn anywhere and anytime without confinement of classroom (Abdul Karim Alias, 2010). Hence, students learn more effectively when the delivery of lectures is blended with the use of technology and can be learned at flexible hours. Blended learning an approach that combines face to face instruction with technology, emphasizing customised learning (Abdul Karim Alias, 2014) while flexible learning opportunity to improve students learning experience through flexibility in time, pace, mode of study, teaching approach, forms of assessment and staffing. Therefore, blended learning and flexible learning can enrich learning experience, optimise student engagement, to achieve deep meaningful learning (Abdul Karim Alias, 2014).

One approach to achieve deep and meaningful learning is through a ‘flipped classroom’. Flipped classroom was first introduced by Baker (2000) and Lage et al.(2000), and popularized through online videos and activities by many others. Studies have shown that the average concentration span of adult is less than twenty minutes. In order to make a one hour lesson interesting, is to create a video that lasts for ten to fifteen minutes which can cover a forty minutes lesson. The video is then uploaded to any learning platforms for students to view. By doing this, a flipped classroom has just been created. In essence, the flipped classroom basically reverses classroom activities. Materials or contents are provided online (in learning management system or other learning platforms) and students will study the material prior coming to class. Therefore, classroom time can be used to engage in activities such as problem solving, discussion and analysis.

More research that delve into aspect of consumer behavior and psychology in the digital economy is deemed necessary (Ling Chang, Ling Tam, & Suki, 2016; Nathan, Fook Chiun, & Suki, 2016; Suki, 2016). This study is an extended study of a previous research by Pudin (2016) which explored the effects of the flipped learning approach in a grammar classroom through students’ perceptions on its effectiveness and feasibility. The study has garnered strong positive responses from students’ as most of them favoured flipped classroom in learning grammar. Even though most of the students would prefer flipped learning in grammar lessons, they were some negative setbacks experienced by them especially on grammatical errors done by their peers in the videos. Hence, for this study, the focus is shifted to the grammatical errors made by students in their video presentation during the flipped learning session.

There are two research questions that were formulated as a focus to this study. They are:

• 1.

  What are the most common grammatical errors in students’ video presentation?

• 2.

  What are the possible sources for these errors?