The Application Advantages and Subsequent Problems of Blended Teaching Mode in University English Course: A Reflection Based upon the Status Quo of Short Hours and Large Classes

Ni Xiaoyan

Department of History, Nanjing University, Nanjing, china

Email: nixiaoyan1999@163.com

[Abstract] Blended teaching, by combining the advantages of online and offline teaching, is effective in solving the problems of short teaching hours and large classes in university English teaching. However, there is still a lack of clear understanding as to how the online class can make up the shortcomings of offline class, and how to identify and solve the new problems rising in the integration of the two modes and form a truly efficient“hybrid”. This paper explores the specific pros and cons in the integration practice of the online and offline teaching, and proposes some countermeasures.

[Keywords] blended teaching; efficient“hybrid”; application advantages

Introduction

Due to the actual needs during the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, technical obstacles of online teaching and learning were overcome by the joint efforts of teachers and students. After the epidemic, blended teaching has become the leading way of English teaching in many colleges and universities. Combining the advantages of online and offline teaching, emphasizing teacher’s leading role and student’s main position, blended teaching is effective in solving the problems of short teaching hours and large classes in university English teaching. However, there is still a lack of clear understanding as to how the online class can make up the shortcomings of offline class, and how to identify and solve the new problems rising in the integration of the two modes and form a truly efficient“hybrid”. This paper tries to explore the specific pros and cons in the integration practice of the online and offline teaching, and proposes some countermeasures.

How Blended Teaching Improves Traditional Teaching

Language is a tool for communication, and face-to-face communication between teacher and students in the traditional language classes is considered as the best way of teaching (Wang, 2003, p. 364). However, with the shortening of teaching hours and enlarging of classes in university English course during the recent two decades, this advantage has waned greatly. The rise of blended teaching, propelled by the progress of online teaching technology during the epidemic, provides some targeted solutions as can be manifested in the following aspects:

Firstly, by expanding the space-time dimension of university English teaching, online teaching helps to alleviate the contradictions between the shortening class hours and the unchanged amount of teaching tasks, and promotes the scientific management of teaching time.

Moderate increase of the after-class independent learning tasks is a major solution to the shortening class hour (Wang & Zhang, 2017, p. 85; Li, Wang, & Zhang, 2012, pp. 16-18), but the side-effects are also obvious. For example, deficient supervision and delayed feedback on the part of the teacher, and consequently, low efficiency of students’autonomous study. On top of that, solutions of some complicated questions, which require several rounds of interactions, like the adjustment and self-adjustment in the development of language skills, step-by-step imparting of systematic knowledge and the cultivation of critical thinking and creation ability, can’t be achieved through afterclass activities, and more often than not, have to wait until an in-class explanation.

Introduction of blended teaching into university English class helps to solve the short-hour problem. The earliest flipped class teaching practice in China was carried out under the pressure of the trend of “burden reduction and efficiency increase” and the demand of shortening the class hours. Through micro-videos or online homework, the off-class virtual space enables the teacher to assist the students’preview and review works either by representing the knowledge points or reproducing the in-class contents. Thus the class efficiency is improved and the limited class hours can be fully utilized.

Besides, cooperative learning can also be conducted through online study. Owing to it’s large demand of time, cooperative learning is often difficult to be carried out in traditional classes. This shortage of time can also be solved if the task is transferred to online class and the students are allowed to schedule their own time to complete it.

Secondly, blended teaching boosts personalized interaction in large classes with its increased methods of classroom interaction.

Lack of interaction, especially personalized interaction is the prominent problem in large classes, and special measures need to be taken in teaching methods, classroom organization and other relevant aspects as well to promote students’investment in in-class learning (Wang & Yan, 2011, p. 105). In the traditional classes, it is often up for teachers to take unilateral measures to improve the courseware content, teaching form, class management, etc.. Even so, teacher-student interaction is still insufficient due to large sizes of the classes. Some studies have shown that measures such as group response and pair work may improve large-class interaction (Hou, Yang, & Zheng, 2021, pp. 23-24). However, the effectiveness in practice is quite uncertain: teachers can only roughly estimate the students’ participation in the collective answers by observing their responses. A timely and accurate mastery of the degree of students’understanding, accuracy rate or other fine results is often out of the question. Even if teachers can observe psychological dependence and incooperation in collective answers and group activities, they can not urge the student to improve in time.

Blended teaching can effectively improve large-class interaction. Different kinds of interaction plug-ins spawned by the epidemic are flexibly integrated into traditional classroom teaching. Large-class interaction benefits from the technology upgrading: on the one hand, through using the the homework and testing modules in in-class exercises, students can get the statistics of the results immediately after the exercises, like the total score, sub-score, and accuracy rate, etc.. And the whole-class data such as completion rate of the class, the highest error rate option, the best performer and the like are also accessible on the teacher’s end. Release of relevant data can stimulate more investment from the students, while on the part of the teachers, a convenient and accurate grasp of students’key and difficult points facilitates a timely explanation, thus leading to better interactions in class.

On the other hand, by employing the interactive modules such as interactive evaluation of the uploaded recordings, tasks like small seminars or presentations can be carried out among students, which may contribute greatly to the class participation rate. Slide bullet screen and QQ anonymous speech can also be used in the class for students to raise questions, make comments, or discuss with one another at any time in class. Given the reserved character of the Chinese students, the anonymous system is particularly effective in boosting their interactions. With proper and skillful manoeuvre from the teacher, the interaction in large class aided by the technology of blended teaching can excel small ones.

Thirdly, blended teaching can help solve the problem of limited autonomy of students in the traditional class.

The autonomy allowed for students under the traditional mode is undoubtedly limited: shortened class forces teachers to highlight only the important and difficult problems in their explanation, and the large class forces teachers to give priority to the whole class instead of the personal choices of any individual student. Without human or technical support, assignments of autonomous tasks often stop at the good intention of “arousing interest”. The actual implementation is often abandoned halfway due to the large workload in management and delayed feedback. What is worse, the course might even be maligned by the students due to these autonomous tasks, discouraging both sides in the class.

The auxiliary teaching methods of blended classroom can maintain students’interests by increasing their choices of tasks. These methods include: add different theme options to the task layout so that students can choose according to their own interests and language abilities; apply different evaluation plug-ins or modules, such as immediate scoring of objective questions, student-student evaluation of subjective questions, and teacher-student discussion area etc.. Effective correcting results generated from these evaluation systems can propel students to fulfill independent tasks completely and efficiently.

An additional benefit of online independent tasks is noteworthy here: with the uneven language abilities of large-class students, level-setting for every single exercise and personal choice at individual terminals prioritize students’individual differences, while avoiding open label of “poor performer”or “l(fā)ow ability”, thus reducing the negative psychological side effects of stratified teaching.

Fourthly, appropriate use of blended teaching can help to solve the problem of motivation. University students’ motivation in English learning is usually driven by exams and does not last long. It plummets especially upon passing CET-6. Blended teaching has been proposed as a solution to the problem, not just as a simple platform of fun teaching, but as a means of exploration of the tool values of the course and the language.

A lot of studies have proven that mere use of fun teaching fails to maintain university students’interest and motivation in English learning. Multimedia teaching, a predecessor of blended teaching, with activities like film watching, audio listening of funny stories or cultural background knowledge activates the class only for a short while. Pragmatic values of the class and the language are what hold the motivation long. However, a copy or extension of the high school exam-oriented class, a typical type of pragmatic class, is either insufficient to motivate students: simple in-class activities like text reading, vocabulary study, grammar review and test-prep exercises no longer attract them. “We can do these things all by self-teaching.” This is often the comment from students when evaluating the course. So what are the uses o f English classes in university phase?

The answer lies in solving the problems in language output, a goal that Chinese university students, with certain levels of language abilities acquired through Gaokao, really aspire. And this poses a real challenge for university English teaching: detection and identification of these problems, which rely a lot upon the teachers’keen observation. Technologies of blended teaching can facilitate the problem identification.

Specific problems in students’output are variable, can be anything, therefore difficult to observe and grasp. For example, the conjunction “until” as an obstacle both in reading and writing, the rigid replacement of the phrase “make somebody do something” for “rangziju” in translation, and the monotonous use of the when-clauses for all adverbial clauses of time in writing tasks are the common problems among today’s university students who are strong in testing abilities while weak in language competences. And they are also problems language learners turn blind eyes to and learn only by cramming. Detection of them relies upon a timely and effective interaction between teacher and students, which is the unique advantage of blended teaching. The author observed the above problems with the aid of the interactive and statistical modules, which would otherwise be a heavy workload of low efficiency.

Due to the regular epidemic prevention and control, online-class platforms have developed rapidly and launched a variety of functions, which has greatly improved the efficiency of classroom management, homework assignment, test & evaluation of traditional classrooms. But honestly speaking, be it the multimedia classrooms popular in the last century, or individual equipment terminals accessible to almost every citizen at present, the application of technology must ultimately be attached to the power of Man. Lu Qiang reflected on the use of the flipped classroom when it just appeared, pointing out that teachers and students are both the “essence” of the classroom. This judgment, in the current blended teaching boom, still has its value.

Application Questions of Blended Class

Blended teaching solves some problems in traditional teaching, but new problems keep coming up in the practice of teaching and studying, and they include:

Firstly, learning autonomy. Learning autonomy has been a problem both teachers and technology developers try to solve. The problem was particularly prominent in the pre-class tasks in flipper classes, which place some “idealistic” requirements for students’autonomy, the quality of teaching video, subsequent class interactions and other relevant aspects. Though blended teaching is not completely “flipped”, the autonomy problem is unignorable in its out-of-class tasks. The above-mentioned measures like heightening the efficiency of task feedback, theme and difficulty stultification of tasks can improve students’autonomy to some extend. However, lack of interests and action in pre-class tasks remain almost unchanged.

Some improving measures have been taken: one is by increasing teacher monitoring so as to promote students’ investment, the other is to reduce the difficulty of the task to maintain interest, but neither are satisfactory. As to monitoring, teachers can increase the frequency of viewing students’video, or set up “random inspection” box to prevent “swiping instead of viewing” (Lin, 2020, p. 60). However, constant upgrading of monitoring technologies is in essence an inappropriate monitoring, undermining teacher-student trust, which has been insufficient in big and short-hour classes, and does not serve the purpose of maintaining students’motivation. On the other hand, the effect of reducing difficulty is also in doubt, since difficulty of content is not the fundamental cause of motivation lack. And a potential risk of reducing difficulty is that it may strike the interest of high-level students. Early experience of multimedia class has proved that interest stimulated only by “multi-forms of learning resources” does not last, neither can it really cultivate students’learning autonomy (Sui, 2018, p. 113).

Secondly, interactivity. Interactivity is a field where blended teaching has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, technology increases network interaction, on the other hand, network interaction, compared with interpersonal interaction, has its congenital deficiency. Take flipped class and MOOC, the two most popular forms of blended class, for instance. Both are experimental classes with emphasis on “online video learning”, and the weakness most often criticized by both practicing teachers and observers is “ignoring language experience and interpersonal communication” (Liu & Hou, 2016, pp. 55-56).

With the development of interactive plugs-in, the blend class interaction has been greatly improved, but some non-technical problems still exist in the extracurricular part (Tian, 2015, pp. 86-94). For example, more interaction on management routine than on learning, more question-and-answer interaction than exploratory discussion. Besides, immediate and timely interaction on the part of the teacher cannot be guaranteed all the time, while delayed interaction fails to maintain interests on the part of students. In addition, insufficient use of various kinds of interactive plugs-in dissatisfies both sides on the platform: the teachers struggle to cope with questions from different ends, while students are impatient with waiting for replies. However, to solve these problems, it takes not simple technologies but coordination of teaching, management and other aspects inside and outside the class.

Thirdly, time cost. Time cost of online class is relatively higher as blended class extends the time dimension. For students, independent online learning needs repeated video-watching, reference searching and reading, group discussion and cooperation, etc.. Such explorations help to cultivate abilities, but they are at the same time timeconsuming. Teachers no doubt spend more time, as online teaching requires careful consideration of each component part in it, such as video, courseware, practice, interaction etc.. For lack of interpersonal interaction, parts that coincide with traditional classes (like courseware, practice and interaction) can produce quite different effects than in the face-to-face class, therefore need even more careful comparison and adjustments—some of the adjustments can be conceptual ones. In addition, other works involved in preparation of online classes like massive resource screening, elimination of adverse information, online-offline class management, etc., all need large amount of time. Generally speaking, blended teaching has high demands for teachers’professional qualification, network technology competence and personal devotion to and enthusiasm for education.

Therefore, costs and benefits being weighed, a question should be asked before rushing into the new trend: can the “key-to-key” off-class mode always beat “face-to-face” traditional mode? Under what conditions can blended class be well organized? and in what form can it be carried out more efficiently and to the satisfaction of both teachers and students? These questions are a subject for further practical exploration and theoretical discussion.

Suggestions for Carrying out Blended Teaching

Based on the status quo of large class and short hour in university English teaching, the author of this paper believes that the development of blended teaching needs to pay more attention to the following two points:

Firstly, team construction. Team form in blended teaching is much better than personal form. Dividing work among the team members according to different modules of tasks, mutual technical assistance, group review of the video effects, and shift work in answering students’questions on different platforms, these are measures that effectively reduce the time cost of teachers and improve the quality of each component part of blended teaching (especially the part of video production, which demands high level of computer techniques). Meanwhile, team work in blended teaching endowed with collective power is more able to cope with students’diverse requirements in online learning .

Secondly, progressive application. Courses undertaken by individual teachers are more common in teaching practice. Therefore gradual application of online elements is better than radical overthrow of traditional mode. The development and utilization of the teaching platform step by step, and the integration of the online teaching plug-ins into the offline classrooms gradually and orderly, can avoid the excessive technical burden and time costs for both teachers and students. And this will also also allow the former more energy to explore and develop the advantages of the elements in both online and offline teachings.