Work

The impact of national cultural framework on college students’ willingness to communicate in oral English tasks in flipped classroom mode: a quasi experimental study

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Against the backdrop of “telling Chinese stories well in English,” a core value orientation of college English education in the new era, college oral English teaching undertakes the dual mission of fostering language proficiency and shaping cultural confidence. This study takes the flipped classroom model as the implementation carrier, constructs a national cultural framework with three dimensions of cultural cognition, cultural expression and cultural identity, and adopts a non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design to explore its effects and mechanisms on college students’ oral English willingness to communicate (WTC). Participants include 86 non-English major freshmen from a local comprehensive university in East China, divided into an experimental group ( n = 43) receiving flipped classroom instruction integrated with the national cultural framework, and a control group ( n = 43) receiving conventional themed flipped classroom teaching. The full intervention cycle lasts 16 weeks. Data are collected through oral English proficiency tests, L2 WTC scales, national culture framework scales, structured classroom observations and semi-structured interviews. Quantitative data are statistically analyzed with SPSS 26.0, and qualitative data are summarized via thematic coding. Results show that the experimental group achieves significantly higher post-test WTC scores with a large effect size. Cultural expression and cultural identity exert significant positive predictive effects on WTC, while the direct predictive effect of cultural cognition is not significant. Interview themes suggest reduced oral anxiety, enhanced self-efficacy and greater intrinsic motivation as possible explanations for these associations; mediation pathways were not statistically tested. This study verifies the facilitative effect of local cultural content on L2 WTC, providing replicable practical paradigms and empirical evidence for the ideological and political construction of college English courses and oral English teaching reform.

Source: Frontiers in Psychology

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1910813

Author: Pingting He

Institution: Hezhou University

Language: English

Topic: EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,801