Flipped Classrooms: Supporting EFL Students’ Development of Argumentative Writing with Social Annotations

Abstract

Recognizing the popularity of flipped classroom pedagogy in higher education in recent years, the present study was motivated to extend this pedagogy to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. More specifically, this study proposed an annotation-supported flipped learning approach by integrating a social annotation tool, Diigo, into the flipped classroom so as to facilitate EFL students’ argumentative writing development and enhance their flipped learning experiences. Adopting a quasi-experimental research design, this study recruited 50 students from two equivalent classes of a college-level English writing course. The experimental group was exposed to the so-called enhanced flipped classroom to learn through the annotation-supported flipped learning approach, while the comparison group was taught using the identical curriculum but without the proposed approach in the so-called traditional flipped classroom. After the eight-week instructional intervention, the students’ written essays were collected and evaluated with an English writing rubric to determine the effect of the proposed approach on their argumentative writing performance. In addition, the students’ perceptions of the flipped learning experiences were collected using a five-Likert-scale questionnaire to understand their satisfaction with the proposed approach. Results of the study indicated that the annotation-supported flipped learning approach significantly enhanced the EFL students’ argumentative writing performance, and the participating students also reported high satisfaction with their flipped learning experiences. The overall effectiveness of the proposed approach could be attributed to the mediation of social annotations, which effectively assisted the EFL students in visualizing their critical thinking and justifying their arguments with appropriate evidence, as they were engaged to learn in the flipped classroom. On the whole, the positive findings of the present study offer practical implications and instructional design considerations for EFL instructors, particularly those who are interested in flipping argumentative writing courses in higher education.

Keywords

Flipped Classroom, Argumentative Writing, Social Annotation