Engaging Students in a Flipped English Classroom by Conducting an Interactive Response System and Its Effects on Students’ Learning Achievement and Learning Motivation

Abstract

In recent years, the flipped classroom has been widely adopted. It is a student-centered learning model that has been acknowledged in the literatures. However, students’ engagements in the in-class activities of flipped classrooms will affect their overall learning performance. Especially, EFL learners tend to be inactive in English class. It is important for teachers to provide interactive learning activities and get instant feedbacks from the students to keep them engaged in class. Interactive Response Systems (IRS) provides the opportunities for students to interact positively with the teacher. They also allow the teacher to know better of student’s individual learning situation. In this paper, an IRS was conducted in the in-class learning activities of a flipped English classroom. A quasi-experiment was conducted in a primary school in Taiwan to explore the effects of this approach on students’ learning achievement and learning motivation. The experimental results indicate that conducting IRS in flipped English classrooms could significantly improve students’ learning achievement, but the students’ learning motivation was not dramatically promoted.