Page 65 - BLENDED LEARNING

My advice to intending EAP course developers would be to take advantage of the
experiences reported in the chapters in Part 1 and to design blended learning
courses so as to achieve both principled learning objectives and practical solutions
to problems. I would suggest that all blended learning courses should aim to:
■ ■ Maximise the students exposure to English.
■ ■ Provide experience for all students of a variety of academic genres as well as
opportunities for individual students to gain further experience in those genres
relevant to their academic specialisms.
■ ■ Increase the likelihood of student affective and cognitive involvement by providing
choices of texts and tasks (Tomlinson, 2013).

■ ■ Cater for differing levels and aspirations by providing choices of texts and tasks.
■ ■ Provide opportunities for students to make discoveries for themselves about how
features of English are used to achieve intended outcomes (Tomlinson, 2013).
■ ■ Maximise the opportunities for students to communicate in English.
■ ■ Provide opportunities for students to use English to achieve intended
communicative outcomes in relation to the genres which feature in their
academic specialisms.
■ ■ Provide opportunities for students to seek ongoing feedback from peers and
teachers on their communicative performance.

■ ■ Provide opportunities for teachers to monitor the progress of their students in
ways which enable them to provide constructive criticism and responsive teaching
when it is most needed.

What is perhaps most important though is that every course has to be different
because every course is composed of different students with different wants and
needs. Those wants and needs are not just linguistic; they are attitudinal too and I
would advise blended learning course designers to not only provide choices within
a mode but wherever possible to offer choices to students of which mode(s) to work
with. For example, some students could be posting a presentation for others to listen
to in their own time, some could be giving a presentation through video conferencing
and others could be presenting face-to-face to a group of fellow students. Versatility
and flexibility are to me the key benefits of blended learning courses and they should
be exploited as much as possible.
Reference

Tomlinson, B (2013) ‘Second language acquisition’ in Tomlinson, B (ed)
Applied Linguistics and Materials Development. London: Bloomsbury, 11–30.

62 | Comments on Part 1