Here - EnglishAgenda - British Council

■■English for Academic Purposes (EAP), the training of students for the use of Englishin a higher education setting. This is because most input students receive in theirsubject field of study is provided in English and the University wishes to preparestudents to take postgraduate courses in English speaking environments. Eachcourse focuses on one skill. Levels 1–3 have reading as the main skill, in order tohave students reading in their field of study as soon as possible. Levels 4 and 6have a strong emphasis on speaking to prepare students to participate in class, andlevel 5 deals with writing to enable students to write essays and papers in Englishwhen they graduate. Their exit level should be a TOEFL of 80 or IELTS 6.5.Course for the blendThe course in which this project is based is at the fourth level of English, and is called‘Autonomy and Orality’. The aims of the course respond to the theoretical backgroundof the programme. It is a 13-week long high-intermediate course that meets threetimes a week for 1.5 hours and is divided into three units. The first unit is five weekslong while the second and third units are four weeks long. In addition, each week inone of the sessions students have access to a language laboratory. When the blendbegan, this was the only level in the programme that had instructors who were willingto experiment with technology and there were four groups taught by two instructors.The number of groups in this level had the potential to increase, unlike in otherlevels. In a nutshell, it was selected as a pilot for blended learning courses becauseits instructors were willing to take the risk in terms of technology and the pilot wouldaffect a limited number of participants.Students and instructors in the blendThe population involved in this project includes students and instructors whosebackgrounds are varied. On the one hand there are los Andes undergraduatestudents, who, as mentioned before, are technologically literate, and come fromdifferent fields of study including, but not exclusively, mathematics, engineering,medicine, law, and literature. These students need to learn English due to the foreignlanguage requirements established by the University or because the academicenvironment imposes the need. On the other hand, there are instructors who arequalified in EFL and have teaching experience at undergraduate level, but are not asfamiliar with the use of computers as students are. All of the instructors hired in theUniversity have a native-like command of English and have an EFL, Teaching Englishto Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) or similar degree. In addition, they havetaught undergraduates before and have experience of teaching in the programme.Despite the fact that some of them have been working in the University for sometime, their command of information communication and technology (ICT) skillswere not as good as their students. Some instructors had used computers in theclassroom while others had hardly ever used them for personal reasons or outsideof the classroom. The instructor turnover in the course is high: four in a year.52 | Incorporating blended learning