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This study presents a large-scale systematic review of the literature on the flipped classroom, with the goals of examining its reported advantages and challenges for both students and instructors, and to note potentially useful areas of future research on the flipped model's in and out-of-class activities. The full range of Social Sciences Citation Indexed journals was surveyed through the Web of Science site, and a total of 71 research articles were selected for the review. The findings reveal that the most frequently reported advantage of the flipped classroom is the improvement of student learning performance. We also found a number of challenges in this model. The majority of these are related to out-of-class activities, such as much reported inadequate student preparation prior to class. Several other challenges and the numerous advantages of the flipped classroom are discussed in detail. We then offer suggestions for future research on flipped model activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Several previous studies have investigated the use of questions to facilitate interactions in academic lectures in tertiary education. However, the issue of how disciplinary cultures influence the patterns of questions in lectures has received little attention. Therefore, this study aims to examine the interdisciplinary differences in professors’ use of questions in terms of both their forms and functions. The corpus used in this study consists of 15 small-class lectures from three academic divisions: Humanities & Arts (HA), Social Sciences & Education (SS) and Physical Sciences & Engineering (PS). These data are a subset of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Previous studies on academic spoken English have reported that, compared with other contextual factors, the disciplinary culture seems to exert a more critical influence on the use of various linguistic features. However, the results of this study show far more similarities than differences across different disciplines. Based on the major findings pertaining to the use of question forms and functions across the three divisions, it is suggested that for questions in academic lectures at the tertiary level, the influence of genre seems to outweigh that of disciplinary culture. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Stance, the extent writers intervene in a text to convey their personal attitudes and assessments, has long been a topic of interest to researchers of academic communication. Less studied, however, is how stance functions in spoken discourse. This would seem to be a particularly important issue in the Three Minute Thesis presentation (3MT), a relatively new genre which captures the competitive and high pressure atmosphere of the modern academy. In these competitions doctoral students present their research using only one static slide in just 180s to a panel of judges and non-specialist audience. Using Hyland's (2005a) model, we explore speakers' interactional and evaluative positions in a corpus of 140 3MT presentations from the physical and social sciences. Our findings show that this monologic genre is heavily stance laden and that speakers from the hard and social sciences adopt different stance positions. Hard science students take a stance by casting doubt or asserting certainty in the reliability of information while social scientists claim an authorial self through a more visible personal presence and explicit affective commentary. Our findings have important implications for understanding academic speech genres and for EAP teachers preparing students to orally present their research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]