Page 22 - BLENDED LEARNING

its weakness in speaking.’ Contrary to their findings regarding speaking, Banados’s
(2006: 542 – 543) results indicated ‘a remarkable improvement in speaking skills’
in addition to ‘important improvements in all the skills, especially in listening,
pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar’ in a study carried out with students
on an English programme in a Chilean University.

Little more appears to have been published on the effectiveness of blended
learning since Dewar and Whittington (2004) noted the lack of literature on the
subject. A number of studies have been conducted on learners’ attitudes, concluding
that they are positive towards the integration of CALL or multimedia. At tertiary
level evidence indicates that blended learning may improve student retention
rates. However, there is little evidence available to suggest that blended learning is
pedagogically effective even though ‘improved pedagogy’ is often cited as a reason
for blending. This leaves me questioning if this is a primary consideration for many
of the educational providers for adopting a blended approach especially at tertiary
level and maybe increasingly so in the EFL sector, or if flexibility and cost, to provide
a competitive edge in a global market, are the real drivers for change.
Clearly more studies to investigate the pedagogical effectiveness of blended
learning in ELT are required that provide us with empirical rather than impressionistic
evidence in its favour. However, Salaberry (2001: 52) cautions that ‘a healthy dose of
scepticism about the pedagogical effectiveness of many current technological tools
appears to be well justified if one considers the perhaps overly enthusiastic reaction
to previous technological breakthroughs’ such as language labs, cassette recorders,
and computer-assisted instruction.

Why a good blend is important
Getting the blend right is important as ultimately it can affect student retention,
as Stracke’s (2007) study revealed. The results indicated that students left the
blended learning course they were attending for three main reasons:

■ ■ ‘a perceived lack of support and connection/complementarity between the
f2f and computer-assisted components of the “blend”
■ ■ a perceived lack of usage of the paper medium for reading and writing
■ ■ and the rejection of the computer as a medium of language learning’
(Stracke, 2007: 57).
Two out of the three of these reasons Stracke (2007) gives are referred to in other
articles on blended learning. The ‘complementarity’ aspect is one that Sharma and
Barrett (2007) emphasise as being important in their guidelines and principles
for blended learning. It certainly heavily influenced the design of my blend (see
Chapter 16), resulting in the content of the three modes being linked to a relatively
high degree either by grammar, vocabulary or topic. Also Banados (2006) found
that students preferred face-to-face to online learning, so designed her course
accordingly. This was also true in my context which meant that the face-to-face mode
was the ‘lead’ mode in the blend. This would seem to indicate that getting the balance
right in terms of the percentage of time spent on each of the modes, and the way
they are integrated, is significant.

Introduction | 19