| The outbreak of COVID-19 has spawned an upsurge of the online education in China,but the online education has many problems in practice,such as difficult teaching supervision,unsatisfactory teaching effect and so on.Especially for college English,as a language subject,its teaching quality is even more unsatisfactory due to the lack of a proper language environment and enough teaching monitoring.Therefore,online flipped classroom model seems to be a good medicine to break the current dilemma of the online English teaching due to its ability to break through the limitations of time and space and its strong interactivity.However,the actual teaching effect of college English course in online flipped classroom needs to be further studied.From the perspective of Transactional Distance,this study explores the differences in TD perception between college English course in online flipped classroom(OFC)and traditional flipped classroom(TFC).It aims to guide the improvement of college English course in online flipped classroom and serve the reform of college English teaching.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed in this study.First of all,considering the current online teaching environment and the characteristics of college English course in flipped classroom,this research has modified the widely-accepted Zhang’s(2003)scale to construct a scale of Transactional Distance for college English course in flipped classroom.This scale has been ensured to have good reliability and validity through the pilot test.And this scale is divided into two parts: Transactional Distance(TD)and Students’ Outcomes(SO).TD has four sub-dimensions,including TD between student and teacher(TDST),TD between student and student(TDSS),TD between student and content(TDSC)and TD between student and interface(TDSI).SO includes two sub-dimensions,namely perception of students’ learning(PL)and perception of students’ satisfaction(PS).Secondly,this study has invited 161 non-English major undergraduates from a university in Chongqing who have experienced both the online format and traditional flipped classroom to be participants.Questionnaire surveys have been conducted to the same group participants in these two settings separately.The data collected has been analyzed by paired-sample t test to show the differences in the participants’ perception of TD between these two formats of flipped classroom,and stepwise regression analysis has been applied to reflect the association of TD with SO.The research findings are listed as following.(1)From the perspective of TD,the interactive effect of college English course in online flipped classroom is worse than that in traditional flipped classroom.(2)Participants’ SO Perception of college English course in online flipped classroom is also inferior to that in traditional flipped classroom,especially for PS.(3)Whether in college English course of online flipped classroom or traditional flipped classroom,TD and SO are highly related,and four sub-dimensions of TD can affect the two sub-dimensions of SO to varying degrees.From the research findings,it can be seen that compared with traditional flipped classroom,online flipped classroom has greater Transactional Distance,worse interactive effect,and poorer perception of Students’ Outcomes.Therefore,in order to further explore the reasons for the unsatisfactory teaching effect of college English course in online flipped classroom,this study sorted out the interview questions based on the open-ended question in the questionnaire,randomly selected10 students for semi-structured interviews,and finally used thematic analysis to find out the following four factors: 1)the student-student interaction is not strong;2)the student-teacher interaction is not strong;3)the interfaces used in this course are defective;4)the teaching content is insufficient. |
