Flipped Teaching: Iranian Students’ and Teachers’ Perceptions

Abstract

In an effort to examine EFL students' and teachers' perceptions about the role of implementing flipped teaching in the university context, a mixed-method research approach was employed. To this end, 80 male and female Iranian advanced EFL learners majoring in English translation, literature, and English teaching and 204 Iranian EFL instructors were selected. They answered the flipped teaching questionnaires, then ten percent of the participants (8 students and 20 teachers) volunteered for follow-up qualitative data collection procedures (i.e., the interview) to let the researchers produce more profound responses to the related concepts of the study. Then, the data collected from the questionnaires were coded and analyzed. Also, the qualitative analysis of the research was done using the interview transcripts to support the quantitative analysis results of the research. It included content analysis requiring the examination of the participations' interviews transcripts. The findings of the quantitative part revealed that a majority of students held positive perceptions about engagement, effectiveness, attitudes, and positive affect through flipped instruction constructs in the flipped teaching class. University instructors also had an inclination towards implementing flipped teaching on the whole for the constructs named language improvement, attitudes about flipped instruction, better education through flipped instruction, and difficulty of implementing flipped instruction. The qualitative investigation confirmed the previously-stated results to a great extent in that the EFL students and instructors generally preferred employing flipped teaching and they had positive perceptions about the role of this approach.