‘Flipping’ Lessons in a Multi‐Section Spanish Course: Implications for Assigning Explicit Grammar Instruction Outside of the Classroom

Flipped or inverted classroom (IC) models are promising for foreign language instruction in that they appear to promote well‐regarded practices that bridge both sociocultural and cognitive theoretical frameworks, such as allowing for higher degrees of learner agency and facilitating deeper levels of processing. To date, the majority of work on IC models for language learning has been instructional rather than empirical in nature. By contrast, this study examined the impact of IC lessons on 14 intact third‐semester Spanish classes ( N = 213). Instructors were randomly assigned to either an IC or an in‐class presentational (CP) condition for lessons and accompanying assignments on 2 uses of the Spanish pronoun se . An attitudinal inventory indicated that learners in the IC condition rated their assignments significantly higher in terms of perceived comfort, enjoyment, and subsequent confidence in the material. However, regression analysis showed that ratings were stratified based upon several predictor variables. For measures of L2 knowledge, learners in the IC condition performed significantly better than those in the CP when identifying grammatical uses of the target structure on a grammaticality judgment test. No significant differences were found between the groups’ performance on a rule description task or a chapter test. Implications for implementing IC models are discussed.