Best Practices for Blended Learning

by Pete Sharma, Barney Barrett

Blended Learning (BL) is a key concept in language teaching. When schools and teachers decide to adopt BL, they are faced with a range of challenging questions. Which platform do we adopt? Should we use ready-made digital materials, or create our own? How do we balance the face-to-face classroom teaching with the online component? What teacher training do we run? This comprehensive, practical handbook explores the answers to these questions, and many more.

Section 1 provides definitions of BL, a brief history of the term and an exploration of what the research says. It describes some common models, looks at reasons why schools and teachers decide to use BL and the challenges they face. It lists the key elements for success and presents a practical framework for designing a BL course, as well as describing key features of some of the many learning platforms available.

Section 2 argues for a principled approach to BL in language teaching, and contains 20 practical ideas including: starting and finishing a BL course; grammar and vocabulary; language skills; games and assessment.

Section 3 describes future developments, offers advice on how to evaluate hardware and software, and gives practical ideas for teacher trainers.

254 pages, Paperback

Published March 30, 2018

About the author

Pete started his EFL career as a business English teacher in Madrid, moving to Finland before returning to the UK. He worked as teacher trainer, Director of Studies and school manager before becoming the Group teacher training and development manager for Linguarama, a business English organisation which is now part of the Marcus Evans group. In his capacity as a member of the Group Pedagogical Unit he inspected schools, taught writing seminars in the Middle and Far East, and helped create and run trainer training courses. He has written extensively about technology in language teaching. Pete recently changed from ESP to EAP, and currently divides his time between lecturing at Oxford Brookes University and on the Warwick University pre-sessional courses, and writing. He keeps a blog on using technology in ELT with co-author Barney Barrett.