Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

The presentations and reports participants were expected to give in the workplace
had a clearly defined purpose (to inform and often to persuade). In addition,
effective delivery in both cases depends on accurate analysis of the audience’s
needs. All these aspects helped to build links between the two strands of the training.
Looking at skills
Success in giving an effective briefing or writing a report depends on:
■■ Being organised – organising information and ideas through language to meet
the needs of the audience/reader.
■■ Being clear – highlighting information, clarifying argument, avoiding ambiguity.
■■ Being precise and exact – distinguishing fact from opinion, avoiding undue
generalisation and perhaps an element of hedging.
■■ Being economical – using language and presenting information with the
audience’s needs in mind: neither too much or too little.
Identification of these characteristics produced a happy (if rather corny) acronym
of COPE – clarity, organisation, precision and economy – and the suggestion that
the course would help trainees COPE with real-life tasks. The underlying principle
of COPE also helped unify the two strands of training.
Choice of face-to-face and blended learning
Quite logically, the real-life differences between oral briefings and written reports
suggested a face-to-face briefings course and an online writing course. I would
argue that presentation skills can only be learned through doing, through trainees
interacting with peers, providing evaluations of each others’ performance and
practising and refining these skills through face-to-face interaction. Trainee
development can only come from within but the presence of the trainer as coach
can provide immediate input and act as catalyst. Progress can be rapid and can
have a significant impact within a short period.
In real life, report writing is much more of a reflective, solitary activity in which
the report-writer, sometimes with others but often alone, collects, marshals and
organises data, makes choices in grammar and lexis to present it and manipulates
a range of rhetorical functions to meet the needs of an unseen, if often clearly
defined, reader. As such, it clearly lends itself to a situation unfolding over time where
trainer and trainee do not work face-to-face. In practical terms, it also clearly met
participants’ needs as the entire course could be completed during overseas service.
Course design
Effective course design depended on a harmonious combination of the two strands
so that one course component complemented rather than supplemented the other
in the sense of a ‘good Scotch whisky’ (Isackson, 2002). The IMFRC structure and
COPE principles unified the course (at the risk of overloading participants with
acronyms) but equally so did the fact that both courses took as their starting point
the imperative to meet the needs of the audience (the writer/speaker as writer,
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