Page 134 - BLENDED LEARNING

11

Blended learning: Podcasts
for taxi drivers

Nergiz Kern

Introduction

When I was working for a vocational training institution of the Metropolitan
Municipality of Bursa in Turkey, which provides free courses to adults, I sometimes
had to develop and teach English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses for which
there were no or few course materials readily available. In spring 2010, we were
approached by the taxi association of Bursa who, as part of an initiative to improve
the experience of tourists who visit Bursa, requested an English course for their
taxi drivers.

The students
For the pilot course 15 taxi drivers aged between 26 and 56 who come into contact
with tourists the most were chosen as participants. They were high school graduates
with a traditional educational background. They had some basic English knowledge
which they had been using together with gestures to communicate with tourists.
Some had a strong Turkish accent. They worked at the same taxi stand and the
rapport was very good, almost family like. They were highly motivated as they saw
the benefits of learning English (‘Tourists prefer and trust drivers who speak English.’),
had an immediate use for English and saw fast improvements (‘I did some small talk
with a tourist and the tip was good.’).
The students needed to improve their listening and speaking skills in a relatively short
time to be able to communicate with tourists more effectively.
Turkish learners of English tend to have difficulties pronouncing English words, not
so much because the sounds are so difficult but because they often pronounce
English phonetically like Turkish. Their intonation is also often ‘flat’ as English is a
stress-timed and Turkish a syllable-timed language. Therefore, my students needed
a lot of exposure to spoken English.

The students were not able to attend face-to-face classes frequently so an intensive
course would not have been possible. They often even missed the scheduled lessons.

The course

The course lasted two and a half months. Lessons took place twice a week and lasted
for two hours.

130 | Blended learning: podcasts for taxi drivers | 131