Here - EnglishAgenda - British Council

14A longitudinal case study ofthe ‘blends’ used on coursesbetween the British Council inBulgaria and Siemens EnterpriseCommunications BulgariaEdward RussellContextThe British Council in Bulgaria developed a new kind of course in response tochanges in the local market’s demands over a six-year period. Our corporate clients,mostly from the information technology and telecommunications sectors, demandeda unique mix of English language support and business skills, such as those relatingto customer services, to improve their engagement with new customers. This mixof input, is in a way a blend as described by Oliver and Trigwell (2005: 17): ‘thecombination of a number of pedagogic approaches, irrespective of the learningtechnology 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 languagelearning), and a mixture of technologies. Our teaching centre sought to meetthese mixed needs and we began experimenting with the delivery of a CustomisedBusiness English Course (CBEC) developed initially by Jamie Mann of the BritishCouncil in Bulgaria. Later we sought to overcome timing issues by using face-to-faceand online tools, the classic ‘blend’ that Oliver and Trigwell (ibid.) describe as ‘theintegrated combination of traditional learning with web based online approaches’.A CBEC delivers a blend of language, soft skills and content instruction, the idea beingthat in order to improve the clients return on investment we could take the opportunityto combine business skills with language instruction and write each course based onthe client’s unique specification. It allowed us to borrow key components from freestandingworkshops and embed relevant elements within these.In this case, the needs were initially seen as being support with speaking (to clients onthe telephone), writing (emails, reports), customer service skills, and general Englishlanguage training. This was to be delivered for 150 of Siemens’ telecommunicationengineers who supported clients in the US market. Courses were developed throughneeds analysis of participants and input from the clients. The results showed thatparticipants would benefit not only from language input and practice, but also fromgreater awareness of the modes and text types that are used to communicateexternally and internally. The fact that the partnership with Siemens was longitudinalA longitudinal case study of the ‘blends’ | 155