Here - EnglishAgenda - British Council

students who had 18 hours of compulsory instruction per week, six hours of whichwas a ‘Basic English’ course focusing on teaching grammar, and 12 hours of whichwas an ‘Integrated Skills’ course, which was made up of six hours of reading, fourhours of writing, and two hours of listening instruction per week.The studyMEC is an online LMS designed for BLL, offering supplementary online practice athome or in class. In this study, there were four courses students had access to in MEC.These courses were ‘General English Level 5’, ‘CEFR B2’ and ‘Academic English withIELTS’. The resources were language exercises, vocabulary activities, listening activities,pronunciation activities, exam preparation exercises, language tests and grammarreference units. The interaction types in these resources were gap-fill type-in, gapfilldrag and drop, rearranging words, phrases or sentences, multiple choice wherestudents select one choice from a list of two or more options, true/false choices,checklists where students can select more than one choice from a longer list ofoptions, highlighting words in a sentence or text, deleting words from a sentenceor text, and matching words, phrases or sentences.The interaction types in these resources did not enable any social interactionbetween students and teachers or among students. The system lacked featuresenabling social interaction, such as chat and discussion boards in which studentscould share their ideas and help each other online. There was only a messagingfeature that enabled teacher–student interaction. The teacher could send messagesto the whole class or individual students, and students could send messages to theteacher on MEC. However, students could not send messages to each other, andcould not collaborate with each other when studying on MEC. Therefore, the classpreferred email and their class group on Facebook when collaborating insteadof using the message feature of MEC. Student interaction and collaboration wereimportant in this course, to foster autonomy and learning.In this study, the students in the experimental group were assigned resourcesby the teachers from the available courses weekly. While students continuedto receive face-to-face instruction, they had a chance to study online within acontrolled learning environment via this online LMS providing online supportmaterials. The aim of the weekly assignments was to practise and revise the skillsand points covered in the face-to-face lessons. The resources covered in MEC wereconsidered as supplementary to the course materials used in class and matchedwith the syllabus of the upper-intermediate programme in a recursive manner.Apart from the assigned resources, students were also free to work on any otherresources available in MEC in addition to the assigned resources whenever theywanted. They could search the database of MEC for any materials that they neededor wanted to study. They could read news items which are published weekly, playgames or work on different kinds of exam practice resources. In short, they could useMEC for self-study as well.208 | Students’ CALLing