Examining the Effects of “Small Private Online Course and Flipped-Classroom”-Based Blended Teaching Strategy on First-Year English-Major Students’ Achievements

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article is well structured. The proposed research problem is answered through the proposed methodology. However, I think there is one topic missing from the literature review, which is the concept of the flipped classroom. The references are current and support the proposed problem. The topic proposed in the article has academic and scientific relevance.

Author Response

Comments and Suggestions for Authors 

The article is well structured. The proposed research problem is answered through the proposed methodology. However, I think there is one topic missing from the literature review, which is the concept of the flipped classroom. The references are current and support the proposed problem. The topic proposed in the article has academic and scientific relevance.

Reply from the authors:

Thank you for your valuable suggestions.

1. The concept of flipped classroom has been added in the manuscript (line 134-155).
2. The references have been revised (ling 1034-1040, 1058-1060, 1070-1074, 1083-1098, 1103-1107, 1114-1161).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

A brief summary

The paper “Examining the Effects of “SPOC and Flipped-classroom” Based Blended Teaching Strategy on the First-year English-Major Students’ Achievements" is interesting focused on examining the effects of a “SPOC and Flipped classroom” based blended teaching strategy on the first-year English-major students’ achievements in five English language skills comparing with that of the traditional face-to-face classroom teaching strategy.

The findings and the conclusions are interesting.

Specific comments

In this paper are used some acronyms, such as: LMS, LHuBT.

Add the long form also for the acronym (SPOC).

The abstract is too long, it needs to be shorten, especially the first two paragraphs.

Education is key to the future quality of human life and the sustainability of the world, and education is being transformed in both formal and informal learning contexts by new digital technologies. Blended teaching, characterized as the combination of both online instruction and face-to-face teaching, breaks up the limitations of the traditional face-to-face classroom teaching and making up for the shortcomings of purely online teaching in EFL instruction of higher education. It was effective in keeping high student retention, promoting learners’ motivation and saving costs in EFL teaching. However, as low learning efficiency becomes an embarrassing performance in students' blended learning, it was necessary to study on the effectiveness of blended teaching. 

I think in the abstract, it can be mentioned that in the quasi-experiment, there were 64 English-major students from the same Chinese university of Shandong province, who were divided into control class (N=32, 6 males and 26 females) and experimental class (N=32, 4 males and 28 females).

Add a reference for Bilgin’s citation  line 44-46.

In the Reference List:

Some references miss pages

Ref.1               Line  823

Ref.2               Line  825       

Ref.3               Line  827       

Ref.8               Line  841

Ref.10              Line  848

Ref.15             Line  860

Ref.16               Line  863

Ref.22               Line  877

Author Response

Specific comments

In this paper are used some acronyms, such as: LMS, LHuBT.

Add the long form also for the acronym (SPOC).

The abstract is too long, it needs to be shorten, especially the first two paragraphs.

Education is key to the future quality of human life and the sustainability of the world, and education is being transformed in both formal and informal learning contexts by new digital technologies. Blended teaching, characterized as the combination of both online instruction and face-to-face teaching, breaks up the limitations of the traditional face-to-face classroom teaching and making up for the shortcomings of purely online teaching in EFL instruction of higher education. It was effective in keeping high student retention, promoting learners’ motivation and saving costs in EFL teaching. However, as low learning efficiency becomes an embarrassing performance in students' blended learning, it was necessary to study on the effectiveness of blended teaching. 

I think in the abstract, it can be mentioned that in the quasi-experiment, there were 64 English-major students from the same Chinese university of Shandong province, who were divided into control class (N=32, 6 males and 26 females) and experimental class (N=32, 4 males and 28 females).

Add a reference for Bilgin’s citation  line 44-46.

In the Reference List:

Some references miss pages

Ref.1               Line  823

Ref.2               Line  825       

Ref.3               Line  827       

Ref.8               Line  841

Ref.10         Line  848

Ref.15             Line  860

Ref.16         Line  863

Ref.22          Line  877

Reply from the authors:

 Thank you for your valuable suggestions for the acronyms, abstract and citations.

1. Thelong form of the acronyms have been added in the manuscript (line 59, 84, 126).
2. The abstract has been revised as suggested(line 10-22).
3. Some of the references have been revised or added, and the pages of the references have been added as suggested.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for the hard work. You can find find my remarks as annotated notes in the PDF file.

I wish you great success with your future studies.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

The paper is not well-written and not easy to understand some sentences. The use of English language is not meeting the standards of the Sustainability Journal. There are many grammatical mistakes.  The authors use conflicting and subtle words. The use of verb tenses is very problematic.

Regarding the logical coherence of manuscript and overall organization of the contents, there are some problems. The manuscript should be thoroughly organized in terms of coherence, conveying main message, presenting key results.

I have added my detailed comments in the PDF as annotated notes.

Author Response

Reply from the authors:

Thank you for your valuable suggestions. We have revised the manuscript according to your detailed comments including:

1. The ambiguoussentences or grammatical problems in the manuscript.

The language problems have been revised (Line 75-77, 89, 351).

2. The citationhas been added

The citation has been added (Line 84-88).

3. Why first-year was chosen?

The reasons why first-year students have been added (Line 77-88).

4. This is a strong argument needs citation.

The citation and interpretation of the argument has been added (Line 109-122).

5. This concept (SPOC and Flipped classroom) should be explained in details in the introduction or literature review part. Novice researchers may not be familiar with it.

The concepts of SPOC and Flipped classroom have been added in the manuscript (Line 123-156).

6. Research questions were enough. The hypotheses seem extra. The authors can choose using either.

Thank you for your favored suggestions for the research questions and hypotheses. In view of the different functions of research questions and hypotheses, we decided not to delete either, for the reason that research questions are designed based on the research objectives, indicating the aims of conducting the research; while compared with research questions, research hypotheses are more focused, scientific and predictive in finding out the truth of the study. However, regarding your suggestions, we have revised the expressions of the hypotheses (line 181-203).

7. The rationale of the research design was not clear.

The rationale of the research design has been revised (line 211-220).

8. parametric tests were used but the authors should report if the assumptions of normality were met or not.in addition to homogeneity of variance, the normality checks should be performed. The normality checks should be reported in methods section under the data analysis part.

Normality test has been added in the Methodology (line 245-253, 294-296). Normality of the data has been reported in Results (line 517-528, 532-543).

9. Regarding the number of males in each group, it is difficult to perform t-Test to examine gender differences.I am not sure if it is possible to conduct  independent samples t-test to compare gender groups here. The number of males is too low so I advise reporting effect size measures for example Cohen's D.

    The effect size (Cohen’s d has) been tested and reported (Table 12, line 731-735).

10. Who assessed? Single or multiple rater? If multiple, was inter-rater reliability checked?

Each of the five raters assessed one type of questions singly, and there was no inter-rater.

11. What are the confounders? They should be reported explicitly.

covariates of pre-test (line 634).

12. Where are the results of moderation?

The results of the moderating effect of gender on students’ achievements are shown in Table 11 and line 706-710, 725-728 by verifying hypothesis 7, and discussed in line 871-886.

13. Why? They had the same intervention. Why urban students performed better than rural ones?on what? Not a satisfying explanation of regional moderation of group differences.

The results indicate that regional background gas significantly moderating effect on the first-year English-major students’ achievements in their EFL blended learning. The explanation of the potential reasons were discussed in 4.5 (line 925-940, 951-966, 970-978).

14. Consider revising. The sentence is ambiguous.

   4.2, 4.3,4.4 have been revised (line 796-922).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

This manuscript reports some important findings for the understanding of new perspectives of teaching and learning in these new times. Current teaching will increasingly demand modalities that have been called hybrid or combined in-person education and virtual teaching. This work is very interesting and provides important foundations for combined education. However, I do have a few suggestions that the authors should consider and include in their new version.

1. Because the topic is global, it would be interesting for Latin American and Hispanic American readers to incorporate the experiences of Latin American universities on current hybrid teaching in the introduction.

2. Incorporate reflections both in the introduction and in the discussion, about what the contribution of learning opportunities would be, for example, from John Carroll's model and current studies based on said model, respect to effective learning of the English, regardless of the teaching modalities (face-to-face, virtual or combined).

3. When defining face-to-face, virtual and combined modalities, it may be appropriate not only to focus on the nature of teaching itself. Also, focus both on the nature of the interaction between teacher performance and student performance, as well as on the description of those hybrid classes in which the teacher teaches classes in the classroom (face-to-face) and there is a greater number of students. Students who are present in the classroom where the teacher teaches his classes, but there are several students who are only in the class virtually. I know that currently and especially in postgraduate studies, several high-quality universities have this modality.

4. I suggest that the effect size in the pre-post intra-group comparisons be clearly reported, that is, pre-post control group; pre-post experimental group. Based on these effect size data, discuss the differential effect of teaching modality on academic achievement.

5. Discuss what would be the scope of your findings for current teaching in other areas.

Author Response

Reply from the authors:

1. Because the topic is global, it would be interesting for Latin American and Hispanic American readers to incorporate the experiences of Latin American universities on current hybrid teaching in the introduction.

Thank you for your valuable suggestions. We have added some literature on blended teaching in universities of Latin American countries (See Article line 623-625). However, it is pitifully that the literature is limited or in non-English languages, which is beyond my current abilities to read (Three articles, two from Africa and one from Latin America were published as recently as 2012. Since articles from these regions are less frequently cited overall, newer articles with less time to garner citations top the list because there are fewer older articles to compete with. Spring& Graham,2017). Whatever, I’m going to embark on the searching for more literature of Latin American countries to fill up the gap.

2. Incorporate reflections both in the introduction and in the discussion, about what the contribution of learning opportunities would be, for example, from John Carroll's model and current studies based on said model, respect to effective learning of the English, regardless of the teaching modalities (face-to-face, virtual or combined).

Thank you for your good suggestions. We had add the contributions of the study to students’ learning (See Article line 38-39, 783-790, 819-821)

3. When defining face-to-face, virtual and combined modalities, it may be appropriate not only to focus on the nature of teaching itself. Also, focus both on the nature of the interaction between teacher performance and student performance, as well as on the description of those hybrid classes in which the teacher teaches classes in the classroom (face-to-face) and there is a greater number of students. Students who are present in the classroom where the teacher teaches his classes, but there are several students who are only in the class virtually. I know that currently and especially in postgraduate studies, several high-quality universities have this modality.

Thank you for your favored suggestions. We have made distinguished the terms of “hybrid teaching”, “blended teaching” and “face-to-face classroom teaching” from the perspectives of the interaction between teacher performance and student performance (See Article line 47-58).

4. I suggest that the effect size in the pre-post intra-group comparisons be clearly reported, that is, pre-post control group; pre-post experimental group. Based on these effect size data, discuss the differential effect of teaching modality on academic achievement.

Thank you for your valuable suggestion. The cohen’s d (effect size) of the pre-post intra-group has been added in the article (See Article Table 6, 12 and 14).

5. Discuss what would be the scope of your findings for current teaching in other areas.

Thank you for your good suggestions. The scope of our findings for current teaching in other areas have been added in the Article in line 862-865, 974-980.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

The revisions are satisfying. Congratulations to you for the hardwork.