Flipping EFL Reading Comprehension Classes: Students’ Learning Achievement and Perceptions
By Quyen Tran
As a lecturer with 10 years of experience teaching English courses, I have observed that students often struggle with English learning even though they have spent many years learning English, often since grade three. This could be because English is a foreign language in Vietnam, where students have no environment for English practice outside the classroom, and the number of hours for English learning in the curriculum is not sufficient for students. I also find that students coming from urban cities tend to have better English than their counterparts who studied in small towns. Therefore, as an EFL (English as a foreign language) lecturer, I constantly look for teaching methods that address such problems. I implemented flipped learning as classroom-based research to investigate its effects on EFL students’ speaking skills and learning engagement and received good results and positive feedback from students, many of whom improved their speaking skills and learning engagement. This motivated me to conduct this research in the area of reading skills, alongside my co-researchers.
This study contributes insights into the positive impacts of the flipped classroom method on EFL students’ reading comprehension, learning motivation activated by enhanced competence, autonomy and relatedness, learning engagement, and satisfaction. I also discovered challenges in implementing the flipped classroom. Some students, for example, did not complete the preparatory tasks at home and took advantage of their peers’ work in group-sharing activities. Some students may have also overused Google Translate for preparatory tasks. Therefore, EFL teachers and practitioners should consider ways to overcome such pitfalls in their teaching practices.
Overall, this study contributes to resolving problems in English language teaching in Vietnamese higher education as well as similar EFL contexts, providing (1) an innovative flipped classroom method for improving students’ reading comprehension, learning motivation, engagement and satisfaction, and (2) valuable references for future research using the flipped classroom method in EFL contexts.
Read the TLI article here.
