THE EFFECT OF A FLIPPED CLASSROOM APPROACH ON EFL JAPANESE JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCES AND ATTITUDES

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to apply the flipped classroom approach to teaching English in order to examine its effectiveness on Japanese EFL junior high school students’ performances, attitudes and perceptions toward learning English. The researchers implemented the flipped classroom by creating videos based on the students’ textbook and grammar points, which were the present progressive and regular verb past tenses and uploaded those videos to YouTube to let the students watch them beforehand at home. A hundred and sixty 7th grade students (1st year of junior high) participated (40 students in each class). The students of the experimental group (n=80) were required to watch the videos at home and fill in the worksheet to learn by themselves and come to class prepared to ask for clarification, if needed. The control group students (n=80) received in-class traditional instruction only. Both groups received three classes each for the present progressive and past tense of regular verbs then took a grammar test and a speaking test. Student pre-questionnaires, post-questionnaires, and teacher interviews in the flipped classroom were also conducted to analyze perceptions toward English and flipped classroom. The experiment was conducted with a counterbalanced design. The results illustrated that (1) adopting the flipped classroom strategy in teaching present progressive appeared to play a role in enhancing the students’ grammar and speaking performances (via the statistical analysis of the post-test results); (2) the difference in result was not significant when analyzing the whole post-test results that ignored grammar, indicating that the flipped classroom can’t be conclusively indicated as a necessarily effective means; and (3) the questionnaires and interviews showed that the students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards using the flipped classroom strategy in the EFL class were positive.