Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

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A thinking-based blended
learning course in an uppersecondary
school in Latvia
Alexander Sokol, Edgar Lasevich, Renata Jonina and
Marija Dobrovolska-Stoian
Course background
The course described in this study was offered to students aged 16 –19, who study
English as a second foreign language in an upper-secondary school located in the
centre of Riga, Latvia. They have three 40-minute lessons a week. Many of them
take a graduation exam in English, and are interested in General English. Groups are
normally heterogeneous, from ten to 15 people and the levels range from A2 to B2.
The study covers the period from September 2008 to December 2009. The blended
approach was adopted for the following reasons:
■■ To provide learners with extra opportunities for learning (in addition to the official
three academic hours generally viewed as insufficient in the local context).
■■ To improve motivation by integrating the use of ICT into the learning process
(the use of ICT increased motivation as it was not widely spread at that time and
students generally regarded its use in the lessons as a way of making learning
more connected with the real world).
■■ To develop skills for autonomous learning and at the same time reduce the
number of tasks performed by the teacher through delegating them to the online
modules. This would allow the teacher to spend more time on individual support
of each learner as technology would provide learners with feedback based on
their typical mistakes.
Description of the blend
Online modules
The e-learning module of the blend was developed in the framework of an
international project, New Learners in the New Europe (2005 – 08), supported by
the European Commission (New Learners in the New Europe, 2008). The aim of the
project was to develop modules for online learning that allow for an integrated
development of language and thinking skills of learners. The learning environment
was created specifically for the purposes of the project and it comprises three
main modules:
■
■ the planning module, where the decisions are made about what is going to be
learned and how it will be done
A thinking-based blended learning course | 189