School of Languages at XJTLU Conference 2024

In this presentation, we will explore how learners of Japanese at an elementary level recognise the importance of self-study before attending their classes based upon our data of learner interviews.

‘Flipped Language Learning; Student engagement and their academic achievement’ is our 2-year-long TDF project. In the SoL Symposium in June 2023, we presented our initial statistical findings on what percent of strong-performance-ranged students, middle- and weak-ranged students in assessment had actually watched self-learning videos as flipped learning before they attended seminars. We discussed, at that time, to what extent a clear correlation could be quantitatively observed between our students’ academic achievement in the module and their engagement in self-learning activities.

This time, we are going to demonstrate our new qualitative findings on the degree of learners’ recognition of their self-study through interview data of our students. We conducted individual as well as group interviews in June 2023, focusing on students’ participation in flipped learning and reflection of their learning experiences. Then, using the Need Analysis Models as a framework, we carefully analysed to what extent the correlation could be observed between their self-learning activities before attending classes and their recognition of the significance of self-learning and how it has influenced their academic achievements.

Based on our analysis, we believe that (1) one of the most important keys to successful language learning is that learners recognise the significance of self-study, and that (2) equipping themselves with such skills ultimately empowers them to be a good independent learner. We would like to share our findings with many conference delegates.