Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

14
A longitudinal case study of
the ‘blends’ used on courses
between the British Council in
Bulgaria and Siemens Enterprise
Communications Bulgaria
Edward Russell
Context
The British Council in Bulgaria developed a new kind of course in response to
changes in the local market’s demands over a six-year period. Our corporate clients,
mostly from the information technology and telecommunications sectors, demanded
a unique mix of English language support and business skills, such as those relating
to customer services, to improve their engagement with new customers. This mix
of input, is in a way a blend as described by Oliver and Trigwell (2005: 17): ‘the
combination of a number of pedagogic approaches, irrespective of the learning
technology used’. The blend we used over a series of courses was a mix of pedagogy
(drawing on content and language integrated learning and task based language
learning), and a mixture of technologies. Our teaching centre sought to meet
these mixed needs and we began experimenting with the delivery of a Customised
Business English Course (CBEC) developed initially by Jamie Mann of the British
Council in Bulgaria. Later we sought to overcome timing issues by using face-to-face
and online tools, the classic ‘blend’ that Oliver and Trigwell (ibid.) describe as ‘the
integrated combination of traditional learning with web based online approaches’.
A CBEC delivers a blend of language, soft skills and content instruction, the idea being
that in order to improve the clients return on investment we could take the opportunity
to combine business skills with language instruction and write each course based on
the client’s unique specification. It allowed us to borrow key components from freestanding
workshops and embed relevant elements within these.
In this case, the needs were initially seen as being support with speaking (to clients on
the telephone), writing (emails, reports), customer service skills, and general English
language training. This was to be delivered for 150 of Siemens’ telecommunication
engineers who supported clients in the US market. Courses were developed through
needs analysis of participants and input from the clients. The results showed that
participants would benefit not only from language input and practice, but also from
greater awareness of the modes and text types that are used to communicate
externally and internally. The fact that the partnership with Siemens was longitudinal
A longitudinal case study of the ‘blends’ | 155