Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

pairs and groups on collaborative tasks or as a whole class and I was able to provide
immediate feedback and help, which is important for learners who have been out of
class for a long time and with the needs mentioned above.
The online component
I only used the internet once or twice to show and explain the blog and its
features. Almost all of the class time was used to elicit and introduce new language,
collaboratively build dialogues and practise the language to make the most of the
limited time we were together.
The online component was meant to extend classroom time and provide students
with a record of coursework giving them the opportunity to review and practise the
language on their own between the lessons and after the course had finished.
The mobile component
Taxi drivers have a lot of downtime. As my students could not attend face-to-face
classes so often but needed a lot of practice, I wanted them to make use of this
time when they were waiting for passengers. The technology – their mobile phones
– was already available and they knew how to use them. So, the technology was
‘normalized’, as Bax (2003) calls it, and no additional cost or technology training was
needed. Listening to the recordings in their work environment could also help them
relate to, and retain, the material better (Mayes and De Freitas, 2007).
b. Tools
The podcasts
Originally, only the face-to-face component was planned. The idea of the podcasts
occurred to me after the course had started and I saw that the four hours a week
would not be sufficient to provide the learners with enough practice. Also, the break
between the lessons was too long and without anybody to model the language for
them outside class, they would not be able to practise on their own. Moreover, almost
none of the drivers could attend every lesson due to their work. This is why I started
taking snapshots of the board work in class and typing them up neatly with a word
processor. I saved these as PDF files. Then, I recorded myself speaking the dialogues,
words and phrases and uploaded them together with the transcripts to the blog.
In a typical lesson we would focus on one of the stages of a taxi ride or typical
conversations between the passengers and the taxi driver. I would elicit information
and language from the taxi drivers and help them with the language, and we would
construct the dialogue together on the board. For example, one lesson was about
making recommendations for hotels and places to visit. When writing the script for
the recording, I would add a brief introduction in order to lead into the topic, provide
a context, and to give students some new language to listen to besides the review of
what we had done in class. I also sometimes added alternative phrases or sentences
that could be used in the same situations. This way, there was always something new
to learn from the podcasts, too. The transcript of the audio recording based on the
‘Making Recommendations’ lesson looked like this:
Hi! This is English for Taxi Drivers recording 18.
134 | Blended learning: podcasts for taxi drivers