Abstract:

Along with the birth of the Internet and the increasing adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs), many society sectors have experienced a rapid innovation and transformation. The same applies to education with the adoption of virtual reality, artificial intelligence tools and the embracing of blended learning approaches. The flipped classroom model is one of these blended approaches that had a pervasive impact on teaching and learning in most disciplines.

In our recent review of reviews about flipped classroom (FC), implementations, it was found that FC is dominantly used in nursing, medical and engineering education. But, it is hardly implemented in language education.

This brings us to the aim of the present study that focused on an FC implementation in English as a Foreign language courses in Chinese universities at college level. As part of this study, the impact of FC was studied on students’ self-efficacy while focusing on students’ listening skills; again, a neglected area in the related research.

In the present study, a pretest, midtest and posttest design was adopting, comparing the impact on students enrolled in an intervention setting versus a control setting. Learner’s self-efficacy (SE) was measured by developing an English Learning Self-Efficacy Scale (ELSES), inspired by the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES) of Schwarzer [13], the motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire ((MSLQ)) of Pintrich and De Groot [15], Student Efficacy Scale of Jinks and Morgan [16], and the English learning motivation scale of Liu and Chu [17]. The 30-item ELSES focused on self-efficacy in relation to English listening. The 28 students in the control group were taught following regular teacher driven face-to-face classroom strategies. The 28 students in the experimental group were enrolled in a parallel version of the course set up following FC guidelines. REPEATED MEASURES ANOVA was used to test the potential differences in students’ Self-Efficacy. Significantly higher SE scores were reported in the middle and at the end of the study by FC students. Future research could focus on investigating the effect of flipped classroom on the composing factors of students’ SE, such as their sense of effort, sense of talent, environment sense, accomplishment of aim, and self-expectations.

Keywords:

Flipped classroom, self-efficacy, College English listening learning.