Although flipped learning has been recognized as being a potential approach enabling students to learn at their own pace before the class and facilitating in‐depth peer‐to‐peer and student‐to‐teacher interactions in the class, it remains a challenge to promote students' active learning in the before‐class stage, which could significantly affect their in‐class engagement and learning performance. In this study, a reflective thinking‐promoting approach is proposed to facilitate students' learning design project performance, technology‐enhanced active engagement, and their reflective thinking and participation in the before‐class stage of flipped learning. A quasi‐experiment was conducted on a flipped Digital Learning course of a Master's program in a university to evaluate the effects of the approach on students' learning design performance, engagement, reflective thinking and participation. A total of 19 students (7 male and 12 female) were in the experimental group learning with the reflective thinking‐promoting approach, while 19 (4 male and 15 female) were in the control group learning with the conventional flipped learning approach. The results indicated that the proposed approach significantly enhanced not only the students' learning design project outcomes and reflective thinking, but also their engagement and participation in the before‐class stage of flipped learning. Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic Flipping learning is an effective teaching approach that shifts the lecture time to the before‐class stage and hence teachers have more time to conduct learning activities to promote students' higher order thinking as well as to deal with individual students learning problems. Students' learning experience, motivation and belief could be the factors that guide students towards engagement and participation in content and help them learn new skills. Engaging students in reflective thinking is an important and challenging issue. It provides students with an opportunity to scrutinize their own learning and hence make progress. What this paper adds A reflective thinking‐promoting approach into flipped learning is proposed to facilitate students' flipped learning engagement and participation behaviors as well as their project performance and reflective thinking. In addition to promoting students' learning outcomes, the results indicated that the proposed approach provides promising results on the technology‐enhanced active learning experience and participation in online learning in the before‐class stage of flipped learning. Implications for practice and/or policy Via monitoring students' online before‐class progress, instructors can recognize the factors that affect students' learning, adjust or differentiate their instruction and even provide students with more opportunities or with additional support to meet students' needs for learning. The link between the video lectures and the classroom activities can be examined in future research to perceive the influence of video lectures on students' participation behaviors in‐class activities. Forming reflective thinking skill is important, but attainable; it needs students' engagement and participation in time and effort.

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This study investigates differences in request e-mails written in English by Chinese English learners and native American English speakers The results show that while Chinese English learners treat e-mail communications like either formal letters or telephone conversations, native American English speakers regard e-mail communications as closer to written memos It was also found that although the native American English speakers structure their e-mail request messages in a rather direct sequence, the linguistic forms they employ to express their requests are more indirect In contrast, the Chinese English learners structure their request messages in an indirect sequence, but the linguistic forms they use to realize their requests are more direct Given this contrast, it is not surprising that some of the request samples written by Chinese English learners were judged as very impolite by the native English speaking evaluators in this study The findings of this study thus demonstrate the importance of studying requests within the overall discourse in which they occur. Studying only the linguistic forms used in phrasing the request itself, as in the studies conducted by Blum-Kulka et al (1989), cannot provide us with a full picture of the cultural differences inherent in making requests