Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

not so much for language improvement but training in the soft skills of a) delivering
presentations/briefings and b) producing reports.
I faced, however, a number of challenges. As professionals, trainees spent
considerable time out of the country in locations ranging from Minsk to Riga to
Bangkok. This precluded regular standard course delivery. Secondly, as a project
manager with a wide, varied portfolio (and a relatively small budget), I could not
commit to regular classroom teaching. Neither was there a pool of local teachers
on whom to draw: one of my roles was to enhance teacher skills to a point at which
there would be. Blended learning, therefore, was not just a good idea but a necessity.
Rationale for course design
The AMFA requested soft skills training, in particular report-writing and presentationdelivery.
An often subtle mix of language and skills, this type of training delivery is
located on that intriguing, vast and sometimes forgotten branch of Hutchinson and
Water’s ESP tree as English for Occupational Purposes (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987:
13) or perhaps more helpfully, English for the world of work. Content of such a course
needs to directly target workplace needs and both AMFA administration and the
trainer agreed that the focus of training should not be on the language itself but what
could be done with the language.
Looking at genre
Like many course-designers, I find it useful to think in terms of genre, generic
features and generic moves: identification of, and hands-on practice by, generic
features by learners seems to me to provide a common-sense rather than a
theoretical route to enable novice writers/speakers to handle the discourse they
aspire to use effectively. In our context, ‘presentations’ and ‘reports’ are often very
loosely-used terms which cover a wide variety of genres and one challenge to the
course designer is to determine which specific generic features are of relevance.
However, I would argue that both genres have a great deal in common, a fact which
nicely lends itself to course design. Discussion and needs analysis showed the target
group would be expected to:
■■ give briefings/produce reports to highlight information which had been gathered
in some way
■■ describe how that information had been identified
■■ outline what should be done based on that information.
Topped and tailed with introduction and conclusion, this gave a familiar generic
structure for both oral and written forms of:
I Introduction
M Methodology
F Findings
R Recommendations
C Conclusion
148 | Blended learning for English for occupational purposes