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A case study of blended
learning: The ‘Communicative

Assessment – Development

of Testing Skills’ project

Keith O’Hare and Xu Bo

Background
In 2010, the British Council in China decided to use a blended learning approach for
a training course to develop testing skills, targeting test-writers and key teachers in
secondary schools in certain cities and provinces across the country.

Whilst it could be argued that all learning is blended, through the use of any
combination of instructional modalities (Bersin et al., 2003), such as videos or books,
or instructional methods (Driscoll, 2002), such as problem solving or case studies,
this was the first time the British Council in China had attempted combining online
and face-to-face instruction.
This article outlines why we decided to take this approach, the challenges we met
and the learning points of this training project, with particular reference to blended
learning. As will be seen, the socio-cultural and educational context of China plays
an important role and may be of interest for other organisations working in so-called
‘Confucius-heritage’ contexts.

The need
In the Chinese teacher education system, teacher researchers (responsible for
writing higher-stake tests) and key teachers (responsible for writing lower-stake
tests, and for supporting other teachers in their schools and neighbourhoods) are
given little formal training in how to write tests. Tests are often written by teacher
researchers drawing on their experience as a student or novice teacher when
teaching was largely based on a grammar–translation approach, and so tests
tend to reflect that approach.

Thus, with the backdrop of a new national curriculum that encouraged communicative
teaching and learning of English, a clear need was identified to train this group of test
writers in the basic skills to develop communicative tests that had a positive backwash
on teaching. They needed knowledge of the latest theories of assessment and its
relation to testing and teaching, skills development (to write better tests), and a
change in mind-set to believe that a different type of test would be beneficial for
them, their teachers and their students.

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