The effects of flipped instruction through authentic videos on Turkish EFL learners' use of speech acts and willingness to communicate

Teaching speech acts from pragmatics in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) has been one of the neglected areas for several concerns such as limited class hours and inauthentic textbook content. Flipped classroom in which the instruction stage is completed before the class through communication technologies allows to allocate more in-class time for practice, especially for speech acts. Also, the inauthenticity of ELT textbooks could be compensated with authentic videos containing the use of speech acts. At this point, it could be remarkably useful to adopt flipped classroom instruction with authentic videos in teaching speech acts. Therefore, this quasi-experimental study that adopted mixed method design investigated the relation between teaching through flipped classroom with authentic videos and the EFL learners' performance on the use of speech acts. The participants who were 50 Turkish EFL students studying at Preparatory Department of English at a state university were divided into two groups as experimental (N=25) and control (N=25). The experimental group had flipped instruction on speech acts with authentic videos for 5 weeks while the control group were instructed in traditional classroom through the textbook as normally. Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was administrated to both groups in pre-test and post-test stages, and the experimental group were administrated a Perception Questionnaire and semi-structured interviews (N=5). The findings revealed that the experimental group outperformed those in the control group in terms of using speech acts. The data for Perception Questionnaire and semi-structured interviews also suggested that the experimental group had a positive perception towards flipped classroom and using authentic video-clips. It was also revealed that the participants in experimental group had an increased willingness to communicate after the treatment through flipped classroom and authentic videos.