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students who had 18 hours of compulsory instruction per week, six hours of which
was a ‘Basic English’ course focusing on teaching grammar, and 12 hours of which
was an ‘Integrated Skills’ course, which was made up of six hours of reading, four
hours of writing, and two hours of listening instruction per week.
The study

MEC is an online LMS designed for BLL, offering supplementary online practice at
home or in class. In this study, there were four courses students had access to in MEC.
These courses were ‘General English Level 5’, ‘CEFR B2’ and ‘Academic English with
IELTS’. The resources were language exercises, vocabulary activities, listening activities,
pronunciation activities, exam preparation exercises, language tests and grammar
reference units. The interaction types in these resources were gap-fill type-in, gap-
fill drag and drop, rearranging words, phrases or sentences, multiple choice where
students select one choice from a list of two or more options, true/false choices,
checklists where students can select more than one choice from a longer list of
options, highlighting words in a sentence or text, deleting words from a sentence
or text, and matching words, phrases or sentences.
The interaction types in these resources did not enable any social interaction
between students and teachers or among students. The system lacked features
enabling social interaction, such as chat and discussion boards in which students
could share their ideas and help each other online. There was only a messaging
feature that enabled teacher–student interaction. The teacher could send messages
to the whole class or individual students, and students could send messages to the
teacher on MEC. However, students could not send messages to each other, and
could not collaborate with each other when studying on MEC. Therefore, the class
preferred email and their class group on Facebook when collaborating instead
of using the message feature of MEC. Student interaction and collaboration were
important in this course, to foster autonomy and learning.

In this study, the students in the experimental group were assigned resources
by the teachers from the available courses weekly. While students continued
to receive face-to-face instruction, they had a chance to study online within a
controlled learning environment via this online LMS providing online support
materials. The aim of the weekly assignments was to practise and revise the skills
and points covered in the face-to-face lessons. The resources covered in MEC were
considered as supplementary to the course materials used in class and matched
with the syllabus of the upper-intermediate programme in a recursive manner.

Apart from the assigned resources, students were also free to work on any other
resources available in MEC in addition to the assigned resources whenever they
wanted. They could search the database of MEC for any materials that they needed
or wanted to study. They could read news items which are published weekly, play
games or work on different kinds of exam practice resources. In short, they could use
MEC for self-study as well.

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