Conclusion

he noticed in students’ work. Furthermore, it was easy for the teacher to give brief

explanations to the entire class if there were any common errors discovered. On the other hand, students in the Regular Group only received feedback from the teacher a week after they had completed their compositions. What students were writing was no longer fresh in their mind, and they were not able to make any adjustments to their compositions as those in the Flipped Group were. Furthermore, even though the instructor was able to give feedback to the entire class regarding common errors noticed in students’ writing, which also could not be done until days after the compositions had been submitted. The capability of giving

immediate feedback to students during the process of writing the English compositions appears to give a clear advantage to students in a flipped classroom environment.

making explanations clearer for students in an EFL environment, both contributed to helping students prepare for class more effectively enabling the teacher to give personalized advice and instruction as students wrote compositions during class time. Students in the regular classroom, however, were unable review the teacher’s explanations at their leisure and did not have the convenience of the teacher’s words being displayed on a screen. These two factors seem to have the most importance in the success seen in students studying under the flipped classroom methodology.

Flipping the classroom requires students to take control of their learning (Alvarez, 2011; Fulton, 2012b), similar to the definition of autonomy provided by Benson (2001), who states, “I prefer to define autonomy as the capacity to take control of one’s learning, largely because the contrast of control appears to be more open to investigation than the constructs of charge or responsibility (p. 47).” Therefore, the authors had hypothesized that students in a flipped classroom environment would feel more in control of their learning as they could choose when and where they wished to study, resulting in higher writing ability,

demonstrable through measured improvements in the length of and quality of in their writing skills.

Despite the results of this study indicating flipped learning to be greatly beneficial to

students in the language classroom, we do admit it is limited by several weaknesses. First, the sample size of both the RG (i.e., 11) and the FG (i.e., 11) may not be considered large enough to give a strong enough indication of whether similar results would be observed in other classrooms. However, the effect sizes were strong throughout the analyses, and there was no overlapping of 95% Confidence Intervals suggesting such findings may also be observed in other studies. Conclusions may be strengthened with larger sample sizes in future researches.

A second weakness is the lack of base information about the subjects at the beginning of the study. Although demographics were received, further details, such as those related to students’ scores in English proficiency tests, the amount of time students spend studying, experience with English outside of classes at school and experience studying abroad will certainly be required in future studies.

A third and perhaps most serious limitation of the study is the statistical difference in proficiency at the pretest stage. Due to the two groups being taught at different academic institutions, the authors were unable to mix participants to create statistically even groups.

However, the results of the ANCOVA and paired-sample t tests conducted within the groups indicated the proficiency of the FG was significantly higher in the posttest when pretest scores were assumed equal (i.e., an ANCOVA) and when we looked at the progress by each

group. Admittedly, it is possible that a higher proficiency at the initial stage of the study may have contributed to the differences in the number of hours studied and words produced. In future projects, researchers will need to be aware of this and take necessary steps to prevent differences early in the study. Despite this difference, the authors do believe a base on which further research into the benefits of teaching L2 composition writing in a flipped classroom environment has been established.

Teachers considering the flipped classroom methodology, however, must be aware of the burden they will be faced with, especially within an EFL environment. Bergmann and Sams (2012) recommend 10 to 15 minutes as the ideal length for a flipped classroom video.

With the added feature of closed captions, timed to match the utterances of the speaker, which proved a vital point in the present study, it can take several hours for teachers to create effective videos. This effort by teachers, however, has statistically proven to be reflected in students' study time, amount of production in writing and quality of their work in class.

As the use of a flipped classroom appears to be effective in an EFL environment, there is a need to look at the finer points of this approach to teaching. What kinds of students tend to get the most out of studying under the flipped classroom methodology? Are students who are highly motivated to study English more likely to be satisfied with this way of

teaching, or are flipped classrooms the answer to increasing the drive to learn in those who have low L2 learning motivation? Questions such as these will be the focus of further research as the quest to discover more about the effectiveness of flipped classrooms continues.