Page 55 - BLENDED LEARNING

■ ■ English for Academic Purposes (EAP), the training of students for the use of English
in a higher education setting. This is because most input students receive in their
subject field of study is provided in English and the University wishes to prepare
students to take postgraduate courses in English speaking environments. Each
course focuses on one skill. Levels 1–3 have reading as the main skill, in order to
have students reading in their field of study as soon as possible. Levels 4 and 6
have a strong emphasis on speaking to prepare students to participate in class, and
level 5 deals with writing to enable students to write essays and papers in English
when they graduate. Their exit level should be a TOEFL of 80 or IELTS 6.5.

Course for the blend
The course in which this project is based is at the fourth level of English, and is called
‘Autonomy and Orality’. The aims of the course respond to the theoretical background
of the programme. It is a 13-week long high-intermediate course that meets three
times a week for 1.5 hours and is divided into three units. The first unit is five weeks
long while the second and third units are four weeks long. In addition, each week in
one of the sessions students have access to a language laboratory. When the blend
began, this was the only level in the programme that had instructors who were willing
to experiment with technology and there were four groups taught by two instructors.
The number of groups in this level had the potential to increase, unlike in other
levels. In a nutshell, it was selected as a pilot for blended learning courses because
its instructors were willing to take the risk in terms of technology and the pilot would
affect a limited number of participants.

Students and instructors in the blend

The population involved in this project includes students and instructors whose
backgrounds are varied. On the one hand there are los Andes undergraduate
students, who, as mentioned before, are technologically literate, and come from
different fields of study including, but not exclusively, mathematics, engineering,
medicine, law, and literature. These students need to learn English due to the foreign
language requirements established by the University or because the academic
environment imposes the need. On the other hand, there are instructors who are
qualified in EFL and have teaching experience at undergraduate level, but are not as
familiar with the use of computers as students are. All of the instructors hired in the
University have a native-like command of English and have an EFL, Teaching English
to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) or similar degree. In addition, they have
taught undergraduates before and have experience of teaching in the programme.
Despite the fact that some of them have been working in the University for some
time, their command of information communication and technology (ICT) skills
were not as good as their students. Some instructors had used computers in the
classroom while others had hardly ever used them for personal reasons or outside
of the classroom. The instructor turnover in the course is high: four in a year.

52 | Incorporating blended learning