Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

in nature meant that each time we were able to respond to feedback from all
stakeholders both during and after each course, in an attempt to further improve
and refine the package.
The need for a CBEC arose from discussion with the client stakeholders about the
need for improved English combined with a focus on US-style customer services
delivery to their expectant clients. This would enable the company to retain clients,
exceed expectations and meet their corporate objectives. The course participants
were usually male, under 30, graduates of technical universities, and mainly Bulgarian
first language speakers, but there were also a number of Turkish and Armenian
speakers. Despite generally having CEFR B1 and above levels of English, many
service engineers had limited overseas experiences in English-speaking contexts.
Our small Bulgarian teaching centre had an excellent mix of experienced, wellqualified
trainers, managers and a teaching centre manager who was supportive of
product innovations, provided decisions were pedagogically grounded. We worked
hard to develop relationships with clients and met prior to and after every course to
discuss feedback and improvements. We also conducted a mid-course satisfaction
survey to enable us to monitor, and respond to, participant concerns. This structured
approach to client/service provider relationships meant we were afforded certain
liberties and could innovate with the course, using experimental practices that were
considered valid.
An evolving partnership
Initial (non-CBEC) courses began at Siemens in 2004, and were standard, general,
or business English courses that followed a coursebook and provided training to
language-level groups of up to 16 participants. These courses were 48 hours in
length with 24 two-hour classes taking place face-to-face at Siemens’ offices,
two or three times a week, in the evening before their participants’ shifts began.
From this initial stage the CBEC (v2 below) was developed in response to the
participants’ and client’s concerns that the course was not linked to their specific
needs. We added elements that were based on the functional English and softskill
requirements of participants’ working lives (for example dealing with an upset
customer on the telephone, or replying to an email enquiry) as well as including a
more telecoms/IT-specific language focus.
The client demanded faster and greater improvement in their engineers’
performance, particularly in the quality of emails they were writing. This required
us to employ our resources more flexibly to meet their demands. The participants
themselves were finding the longer courses hard going, as they were either before
or after their night shifts. We were seeking ways to add value to this CBEC, without
increasing our peak hour workload, whilst also cutting down on the cross town
travelling we were doing. The idea of using technology to add flexibility to our offer
seemed to make sense, both pragmatically and potentially pedagogically. One of the
ways to assist participants with their writing was to give feedback on participants’
real-work writing, perhaps at an early draft stage.
156 | A longitudinal case study of the ‘blends’