Business English blended learning of non-linguistic students: the flipped classroom teaching model

Abstract

The challenges faced by modern Russian education make require the transformation of traditional teaching models and the introduction of innovative ones. One solution is the use of blended learning. Despite the existing scientific works in this area, the issue of the effectiveness of such a learning model in the formation of foreign language communicative competence remains open. The purpose of this experimental study is to determine the effectiveness of using the "flipped classroom" blended model in teaching the 3rd year students of the College of Economics of the South Russian Institute of Management of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation the discipline "Foreign language in business communication". The experiment was carried out from 2019 to 2020, the total number of participants was 81. Two groups were allocated during the study: experimental group (n = 40) and reference group (n = 41). The participants in the experimental group were trained using the new educational technology "flipped classroom". The members of the reference group were trained using traditional educational technology. To determine the effectiveness of the technologies used, as well as to determine the qualitative changes after the implementation of the pedagogical influence, the nonparametric Pearson χ2 criterion was applied. The critical level of statistical significance when testing the null hypothesis was taken equal to 0.05. In all cases, bilateral variants of the criteria were used. The results obtained (xemp2 = 8.095 > x0.052 = 7.815) led to the conclusion that the "flipped classroom" blended teaching model has an advantage in its effectiveness over traditional teaching in the formation of language competence. The experiment has shown that this format helps students to implement an individual learning path, which contributes to the improvement of educational performance.