Application of Flipped Class Mode in the College English Teaching of Nantong University

Education Research Frontier December 2015, Volume 5, Issue 4, PP.99‐104

Application of Flipped Class Mode in the College English Teaching of Nantong University Tianjiao Zhang †, Chunxia Xu School of Foreign Studies, Nantong University, Nantong 226019, China †

Email: zhang.tj@ntu.edu.cn

Abstract Flipped Class Mode is an exotic teaching mode and the initiator is Salman Khan who set up the Khan Academy in 2007. At present, Flipped Class Mode in College English teaching is of great significance and wide use. The English teachers in Nantong University broke through the traditional ways and reformed the teaching methods. Flipped Class Mode has been put into using among the students of Batch 2014 and the periodical results have been achieved. Based on the research in School of Foreign Studies in Nantong University, it is obvious to come to the conclusion that Flipped Class Mode is beneficial to College English learning because of its advantages. Not only does it provide students with a wider learning environment, but also attract students’ attention and improve teaching efficiency. However, as the results shown, Flipped Class Mode also has some limitations in the process of implementation. This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of Flipped Class Mode, based on the application and practice combined with the present situation of College English teaching reform.

Keywords: Flipped Class Mode; English Teaching; College English; Nantong University

1 INTRODUCTION In recent years, MOOCS, Micro-courses and Flipped Class Mode become the hottest terms in the College English teaching reform in China, owing to the development of information technology and the extensive use of computers and internet. Flipped Class Mode is an exotic teaching mode and the initiator is Salman Khan who set up the Khan Academy in 2007. At first, it was popular in some schools in the United States and it began to be well-known to many teachers and researchers in Europe and Asia in 2011. It causes the extensive concerns of the global education community and the study gradually becomes a hotspot.

Since the beginning of 2012, the domestic research has also been booming in China. The early studies are Microcourses: New Trend of Development of Regional Education Information Resources by Tiesheng Hu and What We Can Learn From the Open Educational Resources to MOOCS by Jianli Jiao. The essays mainly focus on Flipped Class Mode are Research on Flipped Class Mode by Jinlei Zhang, Studies on Teaching Design Based on Flipped Class Mode in the Information Technology Environment by Xiaoliu Zhong and The Interpretation of Flipped Class Mode by Yueguo Zhang. Based on previous studies, this paper discusses the application of Flipped Class Mode in the College English teaching, according to the present situation of the non-English majors in Nantong University.

2 MECHANISM AND PRACTICE OF FLIPPED CLASS MODE IN COLLEGE ENGLISH TEACHING “Flipped Class Mode, also known as Inverted Class Mode Britain to the classroom, has shifted the role of teachers and students in traditional teaching by arranging the reversal of knowledge teaching and knowledge internalization.

Meanwhile, the time in class is planned in a different way, which leads to innovation of the traditional teaching mode”[3]. The definition of Flipped Class Mode can be divided into broad sense and narrow sense: in a narrow sense, - 99 www.erfrontier.org

students are required to watch the short videos or flashes which are prepared by the teachers before class. However, the broad sense refers to arrangements of all the major learning stuffs and learning tasks. Students do the self-study after class while teachers answer questions, solve problems and have discussion or exchange ideas with students in class, which can be generalized as Flipped Class Mode. Considering the English teaching methods nowadays, presidents of many colleges and universities in China have started to bring in Flipped Class Mode based on Microcourses. The English teaching staff in Nantong University keeps up with the times, making great progress in the MOOCs and Micro-courses by means of network and multi-media techniques.

According to the “Long-term State Plan of Educational Reform and Development” and the “Opinions on Implementation of College English Teaching Reform in Nantong University”, it is proposed to set up a specific orientation on the educational idea and cultivation objective. College English teaching aims to cultivate innovative talents with international vision and cross-culture communication ability. Breaking through the traditional concept and reforming teaching methods, the English teaching staff in Nantong University put the autonomous learning by network into practice. Two years later, the new teaching style based on Flipped Class Mode is ready for the language learning of Batch 2014. Up to now, the periodical results have been achieved. Such the innovation is beneficial to cultivation of elites with international competitiveness and leadership talents. At the same time, the reform endows the English education of undergraduate in Nantong University with national influence.

The samples of this research design are mainly distributed in the freshmen of Nantong University. All the majors of Batch 2014 including the liberal arts, the business, the science and engineering are involved in. The objects of the questionnaire are not only the students but also the teachers. As to the choice of students, boys and girls are both taken into account. As far as possible, the whole process is designed to be scientific, reasonable and objective. The questionnaire consists of two parts, in order to analyze the teaching effects of Flipped Class Mode. The issue to be discussed is how to make full use of the new teaching method to improve English acquisition in the earlier stage of college. The data collection is satisfactory. By the end of 2015, 95 feedback questionnaires in total have been collected, including 90 copies are valid. All the preparations are ready for the further statistical analysis.

The first half of questionnaires is for teachers, including 10 closed questions and two open questions with four multiple choices. Teachers should choose a suitable option according to their actual situations of teaching. Questions 1, 2 and 3 are about the popularity of Flipped Class Mode in the college; Questions 4 and 5 are used to reveal the attitude of teachers towards the new teaching method; Questions 6 and 7 are to test the teaching validity; Questions 8 and 9 are for the Micro-courses that teachers make by multimedia; Question 10 is to show whether teachers have formed the habits of carrying out Flipped Class Mode in English teaching. On the contrary, the second half of the questionnaire for the students mainly consists of open questions. Questions 1, 2 and 3 are to understand the students’ learning attitude and acceptance of Flipped Class Mode; Questions 4 and 5 are to discover what kind of students care for Flipped Class Mode; Questions 8, 9 and 10 are to survey whether students are satisfied with their teachers and teaching courseware.

3 EXPERIENCE AND PRACTICAL EFFECTS OF FLIPPED CLASS MODE IN COLLEGE ENGLISH TEACHING In the past two years, a large number of schools have been aware of the importance of MOOCs, Micro-courses and Flipped Class Mode in auxiliary teaching. Articles on this topic have been published in different kinds of journals.

But when it comes to the application of Flipped Class Mode in university, compared to the application to the practice, most of teachers pay more attention to the theoretical research and focus on its advantages. The success of Flipped Class Mode mainly relies on the courseware quality, containing the traditional books, tapes and video discs, which in forms of written text, pictures, sound and movie. All of the above is aimed at rising students’ interest and improving the efficiency. Teachers should give full play to the comprehensive multimedia to construct a more vivid learning environment before class in which students can have a better promotion in language learning. On the other hand, Flipped Class Mode can realize the autonomous learn for the individual. The learner can choose to study in a particular place or a specific period as well as chart learning plan according to his own need. As is known to all, the vast amount of materials and resources for language learners provides them with various learning styles so that they - 100 www.erfrontier.org

can decide what to learn, when to learn, how to learn and how long for learning. A successful autonomous learner is able to make plans in different forms in advance, in which the diversity of the materials in Micro-course wares plays an active role. In addition, the Micro-course wares also have other advantages such as time saving, clearance, language accuracy, standard pronunciation, etc.

Flipped Class Mode puts emphasis on the students’ independent learning with the help of Micro-courses.

Nevertheless, to simply dependent on Micro-courses is till far from enough. Teachers need to remind their students of the necessity of enormous English idioms. The language input is especially significant in the process of second language acquisition. The improvement of English is usually reflected in speaking and writing while these two skills are the output activities. Obviously, the output derives from the input and no language output can operate without language input. Besides that, designers of the courseware should put more elements of Native English into the study before class for the reason that the domestic students do not have the opportunity to be in the natural native English environment. For many freshmen in Nantong University, they are more prone to show negative transfer because of their mother tongue according to the investigation. The main reason can be analyzed from two aspects: linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors. The former one includes vocabulary, syntax, paragraphs and passages, each of the negative transfer can be explained by some examples. As for the non-linguistic factors, they are more complex than the linguistic factors for some deeper reasons such as cognitive mode, thinking mode and cultural transfer. Though research group of this topic launches more discussions in the study of language acquisition itself rather than the non linguistic factors, the cognition differences, individual differences and cultural influences among current college students should more or less be taken into account because they do have a certain influence on autonomous learning.

Anyhow, a serious of relevant researches are still in the experiment.

When Flipped Class Mode is implemented in the classroom teaching, the teacher’s identity has been transformed: he is no longer to transfer knowledge but plays a role as a detector. In view of the fact that the students have finished the prior learning before class, the main responsibilities of the teacher are to point out the problems or the missing content in the student’s learning. A large number of tests will guide the students to discover the problems and make up for their shortcoming. Therefore, the classroom activities arranged by teachers can not always follow the traditional way. A new design is in badly need with the goal of enhancing student’s English practical ability. For example, in order to lead the students to utilize the words and sentences in one course, teachers can give students a daily conversation between two local people or a short story to read, while the result is eliminated ahead of time.

Then students are asked to continue the narration of the conversation or the story, with the premise that the affairs and characters in the last part should go with the context and time and place are required to be consistent as well.

Teacher should pay attention to the words used by students, and point out students’ mistakes as soon as the exercise is complete. All in all, teachers should help students to establish a consciousness: the function of English communication must be strengthened. Only in this way can Flipped Class Mode be realized.

4 TESTING AND ASSESSMENT OF FLIPPED CLASS MODE IN COLLEGE ENGLISH TEACHING As is mentioned above, the testing and evaluation of the students are essential in proving the implementation effects of Flipped Class Mode, which depends on a mature and comprehensive test system by network. iTEST testing and training system is a comprehensive management platform which provides English testing resources and evaluation services online to college and university teachers. The question bank includes both basic training and high quality simulation questions of College English Test, Postgraduate Qualifying Examination, IELTS, BEC, etc. It supports students’ basic training of vocabulary and grammar, listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation. iTEST can help teachers with management function of personalized teaching such as test paper generating, paper marking, professional statistical analysis of achievements. In a word, this system is an indispensable part of Flipped Class Mode and it is good for College English teaching and assessment. Besides that, the system is also suitable for university library, training school and so on. Among the domestic College English test platforms, iTEST is considered to be a scientific platform which can do the test prediction and it is also regarded as the first to provide professional statistical analysis with the test data. So except for the simulation of various kinds of tests in the internet, - 101 www.erfrontier.org

it can also combine teaching with scientific research.

According to the diverse examinations in the past five years, vocabulary is under increasing year by year, the difficulty is enhanced greatly, examination form is changeable and type is flexible. In the near future, the trend of test by network is imperative, which puts forward higher requirements for student’s comprehensive English ability.

To most colleges and universities in China, the passing rate of CET-4 is a measure of the success of College English teaching and the teaching effectiveness. However, the training means and resources at present still remain at a relatively junior level. So it is the urgent need to develop teaching resources and testing system supported by network and pay attention to students’ abilities of listening and speaking training. “The development of an effective examination and training system is one of the problems needed to be solved currently so that students can have an effective response to the examinations by network”[6]. In the early 2014, iTEST was introduced to students’ training system in Nantong University with Flipped Class Mode. Soon it has been immediately applied to all the non-English majors like arts, business, science and engineering throughout the entire campus. The entrance of the iTEST system was set up in the foreign language teaching center of Nantong University as an organic component of Flipped Class Mode. After half a year’s test and training with help of iTEST, all the freshmen participated in the CET-4 exam in June 2014. The iTEST has certain benefit through the score analysis of the last CET-4 exam.

Flipped Class Mode has emphasized the use of information technology to optimize the teaching process in order to maximize the teaching effect, efficiency and benefit. From the teacher’s point of view, the advantages of this test and training system can be summarized as follows: firstly, it can be effective means of simulation training in the sprint stage; secondly, it can set up the e-records to do the diversified evaluation and check students’ learning effects; thirdly, it can guide students to do the effective autonomous learning and test the learning situation; fourthly, it can help scientific or teaching research based on the score statistics and realize the information management of the whole examination process. From the macro perspective, the system saves test costs greatly, eliminates the printing costs and reduces labor costs of the examination. It improves the efficiency of paper grading and greatly reduces the possibility of cheating and labor quantity of examination organization. As the test process is simplified, the confidentiality was improved. But in the use of the system, some disadvantages have been found: for one thing, the transmission of audio and video content encounters difficulties due to imperfect network bandwidth. Sometimes, there is video delay and voice fracture. For another, the question bank is limited and the quality of questions needs improving.

5 THE PROBLEMS AND IMPROVEMENT MEASURES OF FLIPPED CLASS MODE IN COLLEGE ENGLISH TEACHING Nowadays, there are many papers focusing on the study of the Flipped Class Mode’s advantages, but few of them have discussed problems of teaching in-depth and its shortcomings are still staying at the theoretical level. The money consumption is very high during the production of Micro-courses while the high quality Micro-courses are still in lack. Unfortunately, all of these are not related with the specific English teaching practice at all. After the investigation of teaching in Nantong University, the disadvantages of Flipped Class Mode have come to the surface, which should never be ignored in both teaching and learning.

On one hand, the recording of the Micro-courses forced the teachers to spend more time in preparation. Undoubtedly, a good one can construct a really impressive teaching method but it refers to a very complicated synchronization and hybrid with documents, graphics, sound, images and videos. For this reason, up to 66.7% teachers believe it take much time. At present there are already many Micro-course wares sold in the commercial field so that they are used directly by many teachers without any change or decoration. Up to 54.9% teachers response that the existing Microcourse wares can not meet their needs in the specific teaching environment. In view of the fact that both English teaching and the students’ abilities display large regional differences in China, the effective method to solve this problem is to joint several local universities together for a same Micro-course ware making. Collect the local excellent teacher resources and divide them into several groups. Each group is responsible for one certain unit according to the teaching plan. In this way, the workload of each teacher can be reduced but the Micro-course ware with characteristics of local university can be created.

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On the other hand, Micro-course ware with the characteristics of short and fine is different from the traditional courseware. With too much stimulation, the learner’s attention will be transferred. But a lot of young teachers often fall into the abuse of decoration during the designing of Micro-course ware, as too many meaningless cutscenes make the ware not compact. The courseware must be applied to language teaching first but many teachers tend to make them as beautiful and vivid as possible. They download a lot of beautiful pictures and add all of them into the courseware without careful consideration and selection. They mistakenly think that the more complex the contents are the better effects the courseware brings. In fact too many pictures and too much sound distract students’ attention, especially when the students meet the new knowledge. In fact, there is a weakness in the Flipped Class Mode itself, which will influence both teachers and learners. To students, Flipped Class Mode forces them to face a great deal of new information, which leads to the fact that learning focus is not clear or highlighted enough. Thus it has become more difficult for students’ self control which linked tightly to the success of the teaching. Most of the teachers and students believe, various kinds of learning contents in Flipped Class Mode are flashy without substance. Though the convenience of the knowledge acceptance is improved, but students are easily distracted during the second language acquisition. To solve this problem, the research group concludes that teacher’s guidance is substantial. They must show the students how to grasp the core meaning rather than leave students completing the task of Flipping Class only by themselves.

6 CONCLUSIONS Based on the research in School of Foreign Studies in Nantong University, it is obvious to come to the conclusion that Flipped Class Mode is beneficial to College English learning because of its advantages. Not only does it provide students with a wider learning environment, but also attract students’ attention and improve teaching efficiency.

However, as the results shown, Flipped Class Mode also has some limitations in the process of implementation. First, teachers have to spend more time in class preparation by using multimedia equipments; second, the new teaching method can hardly restrain the students’ learning inert; third, the interaction between teachers and students is insufficient; at last, courseware is somewhat scattered due to its rich content. Anyway Flipped Class Mode has important significance and wide application in College English teaching and is definitely the direction of the College English teaching reform. But it is not easy to achieve the goal as it involves a series of revolutionary changes in the second language learning. To a certain degree, the work done in this paper, including the analysis and the results, is corresponding to the current research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was supported by the Project “Application of Flipped Class Mode in the College English Teaching: Taking Nantong University as an Example”(grant number 2014B30) from Office of Academic Affairs of Nantong University.

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Zhang, Jinlei. “Research on Flipped Class Mode.” Journal of Distance Education. 8(2012): 46-51

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3(2012): 9-10

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Zhong, Xiaoliu. “Studies on Teaching Design Based on Flipped Class Mode in the Information Technology Environment.” Open Education Research. 2(2013): 58-64

[6]

Zi, Weili. “Research on iTEST System and Its Application in CET-4 Network Test.” Journal of Southwest University for Nationalities (Humanities and Social Science Edition). 9(2012): 273-275 - 103 www.erfrontier.org

AUTHORSÂ 1

2

Tianjiao Zhang

Chunxia Xu

Born in Nantong, Jiangsu Province in Jan. 1981.

Born in Zaoyang, Hubei Province in Oct. 1963. Ph.D. of

Master of English language and Literature from

Education from Zhejiang University.

Nantong University in 2013.

She is the Professor in School of Foreign Studies in

He is the Lecturer in School of Foreign Studies in

Nantong University, major field of study is Comparative

Nantong University. Current research interest is

Education.

College English Teaching.

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