Students’ experiences and challenges of learning English grammar through flipped classroom and gamification

Over the past decades, practitioners from various disciplines have sought out to improve students’ learning by employing the flipped classroom approach to learning. Many practitioners have seen immense increase in students learning by requiring students to gain exposure to learning prior attending the class, often online and in video format. Class time is then devoted to collaborative exercises, discussions, assignments and projects. With advances in technology, many online resources and applications allow students to access the materials at own pace, time, and place as well as to actively engage and participate in the learning process. Furthermore, considering of making the students learning experience more interesting and fun, thus, gamification strategy is integrated with the flipped classroom approach. However, to date, no study of this combination has been undertaken particularly in respect to English as a Second Language (ESL) in Malaysia and in an English Grammar course. Therefore, this study reports on students’ experiences and challenges that they have been facing for 14 weeks of BIL1033 English Grammar 1 course. The participants in the study were 90 Diploma students taking BIL1033 course at Sultan Idris Education University, Perak, Malaysia. Data was collected by means of questionnaire, students’ reflection journals, focus group interviews, and semester course evaluation. Results indicate that students really enjoy most of the English Grammar flipped lessons. They like to learn English Grammar via Kahoot and Quizziz. The class activities are full of fun and bring joy to learning. The findings from the students’ reflection journals and focus group interviews also revealed that they are always excited to come to English Grammar class because of collaborative activities and games. Individual and team-based competitions encourage students to communicate with each other and engage them with the content through gaming elements. This study implies that a combination of both flipped classroom and gamification places the responsibility for learning English Grammar on the shoulders of students while giving them greater motivation to experiment knowledge that they have grasped in various other tasks.