Book review
by Pete Sharma
The Cambridge Guide to Blended Learning for Language Teaching
Edited by Mike McCarthy
Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 978-1-316-50511-3
 I was, naturally, delighted when my review copy of The Cambridge Guide to Blended Learning for Language Teaching landed with a metaphorical thud on my doorstep.
I started reading the Guide on a long-haul flight to Caracas and seriously, I couldn’t put it down. This timely 278-page guide is concerned with best practice. It contains contributions from over 20 authors.Each of the five sections contains three chapters. The sections are as follows:
Section 1 - Connecting Theories and Blended Learning
Section 2 - Implications for Teaching
Section 3 - Rethinking Learner Interaction
Section 4 - Case studies
Section 5 - The Future of Blended Learning
Section one
The first chapter starts with issues in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). The chapter contends that SLA studies can help us decide the balance between classroom activity and computer-mediated work. The contribution is from the Editor.
Certainly one of the central concerns of BL course creators is what should be done in class, and which elements should be assigned to the online learning.
McCarthy suggests that studies in BL need to triangulate evidence from three areas: SLA research and studies, classroom interaction studies, and “what we know about spoken interaction both outside and inside the classroom from corpus analysis and technology-mediated language learning” (p. 9). Certainly one of the central concerns of BL course creators is what should be done in class, and which elements should be assigned to the online learning. Drawing on SLA, McCarthy writes “that the face-to-face classroom context is (currently) still the best place to develop and deal with humanistic aspects of language learning such as motivation, attention and noticing, giving tactful and carefully phrased individual as well as group feedback” (p. 18). (My italics)
Scott Thornbury’s contribution, ‘Educational Technology: Assessing its fitness for purpose’ is a must-read. He lists twelve principles which can inform the decision on whether to adopt a new learning tool or not. This discussion is, in my view, wider than BL per se, and concerned with choosing ANY tool (or not) as part of a f2f course, as well as a specifically BL course. As with all Thornbury’s writing, I found the prose lucid and the ideas illuminating. One of the book’s highlights.
Finally, Steve Walsh’s chapter on the Role of Interaction in a Blended Learning context is of interest. A crucial sentence occurs at the end of his chapter, which describes the challenge for designers of BL materials: “….what is best done in the physical classroom stays there and is given the benefit of the extra time released by ‘flipping’ other elements of the classroom course into the online environment”.
Section two
I was fascinated to read ‘The Flipped Classroom’ by Christopher Johnson and Debra Marsh. Readers will be aware that flipping’ the classroom means that students receive language input before class.
"How do I make best use of class time?"
One intriguing extract lingers in my brain – in italics below:
Teachers involved in the research devised by the authors considered the question: “How do I make best use of class time?” All teachers came to the same conclusion: getting students to use the language communicatively. The platform is then used for guided practice. So, students were expected to complete the presentation and controlled practice activities in the LMS. According to one teacher, “The actual presentation part doesn’t need to be done by a human being.”
WOW!!
How do you, as a language teacher, react to this statement? The authors are heavily involved in using and piloting software created by Cambridge University Press, which, like OUP digital material includes presentations of grammar points. Would you be happy for the ELT materials created by content experts to ‘present’ language for you?
I have watched presentations of ‘some’ and ‘any’ which say things which I disagree with completely.
We can distinguish two very different forms of BL here, from a directional point of view:
- Type one: the teacher teachers in class, and the BL materials are there to consolidate and extend the face-to-face experience
- Type two: the materials 'teach', and the teacher activates what has been learnt, and gives real communicative practice
These are diametrically opposite, I would argue, making ‘flipping’ very much an umbrella terms which can have a number of interpretations / connotations.
In our recent and well-received course on Educational Technology Today, also run for the Bell Teacher Campus in Cambridge, Barney Barrett and myself ran a session on Flipping which involved three approaches:
- Using content e.g. a YouTube video
- Adapting content e.g. using EdPuzzle to clip a YouTube video and insert questions
- Creating content e.g. using Camtasia and / or Educreations to present language
The ‘flipped learning’ model described in this Chapter fits nicely into the first approach: ‘Using ready-made content’ – in this case, presentations of language points available in the software. Our session in Cambridge placed this example into the wider context of ‘flipping’ in the ELT classroom, which is relatively new compared with the origins of flipping, from the maths classroom of US secondary school teaching. Watch: Aaron Sams on The Flipped Classroom.
The conclusion to an absorbing chapter is that "flipping the classroom is about changing the pedagogy with the aid of technology".
Section three
In Section three, the highlight is the chapter by Susan Hojnacki (Oral Output in Online Modules vs Face-to-Face Classrooms) which provides an interesting account of the positive effects of asynchronous, online communication on students’ oral production.
Section four
In section four, the Case Study in Blended Learning Course Design (Jeanne McCarten and Helen Sandiford) uses Touchstone as a basis for an interesting chapter which explores the impact on classroom teaching when a blended approach is adopted. The last phrase of the chapter is: “BL can be more effective than classroom-only based instruction.”
An aside: I regard myself as an expert in BL in language teaching and yet I haven’t used or even seen one of the most well-known BL packages available: Touchstone. I describe this as the ‘walled garden’ effect – people who use a particular program are familiar with it, whether that program is from CUP, the Macmillan English Campus, university courses or the proprietary materials created by a company such as marcus evans Linguarama.
One of the shortcomings of research conducted by publishers is that they inevitably find in favour of the product they are investigating. Have a look at the case studies available on the internet to see what I mean.
Section five
The three chapters here look at m-learning, adaptive learning and finally, the way forward.
M-learning
Even though Dudeney and Hockly have written about mobile learning elsewhere, their contribution here warrants our attention. They write: "mLearning is … perhaps the most modern incarnation of BL, and a key characteristic of one of the modern varieties of BL, the flipped classroom."
"...putting [the mobile device] centre stage in the blend seems both obvious and desirable."
The authors conclude: “taking the mobile device which has the potential to become the most common, accepted and ‘normalised’ (Bax 2003) piece of technology in the history of educational technologies, and putting that centre stage in the blend seems both obvious and desirable”
Adaptive learning
One of the key opportunities of BL is to support better personalisation for the range of individual differences which students bring to learning situations. The goal of adaptive learning is to provide the best possible learning content and resources for the students’ needs at a particular point in time. The chapter on ‘adaptive learning’ (Chapter 14) helps us understand the concept, as does Philip Kerr’s excellent blog and free PDF on the Round, but it is too early to really unpack the pedagogical implications of adaptive learning on EFL. I think we will have to ‘watch this space’ for more on this topic.
The way forward
“Whilst there is no definitive theory or agreed practice for BL ... it is clear that some basic approaches are emerging ..."
McCarthy bookends the Guide with an outro which is worth reading. Among the conclusions reached are the following:
- “Whilst there is no definitive theory or agreed practice for BL at the present time, it is clear that some basic approaches are emerging, with the multitude of blends in existence falling into some overall major themes”.
- “The field is still, relatively speaking, wide open, with no definitive theory, methodology or practice that could be said to form the ‘canon’ or rulebook of blended learning.”
- “The discipline of BL remains somewhat exploratory”
My experience of teaching on the Blended Learning Cambridge course certainly bears out the idea that there are a multitude of blends, with participants from a huge range of countries and contexts, including teachers of maths, geology and chess.
This useful Guide concludes that pedagogy is the most important factor in designing a good course, not technology. It successfully bridges the worlds of research and practice. You will detect my enthusiasm about this book, not least because it explores an area of ELT which has long been a source of interest and fascination to me. Recommended.
Reference
Bax, S. CALL – Past, present and future System31 (2003) 13–28
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