Application of mobile-assisted blended learning to College English teaching

Abstract

The development of information and communication technology in education requires interactive and individualized teaching and deep learning. The current classroom teaching of College English fails to meet the new requirements of the digital era, which leads to a low level of learner engagement and unsatisfying learning outcomes. To meet the needs of millennial students, a mobile-assisted blended course model is designed for College English teaching following the basic tenets of Constructivism and Activity Theory. The model incorporates the strengths of self-directed online learning and face-to-face offline instruction to maximize results by strengthening the role of the teacher as facilitator and defining a clear division of labor between students and the teacher at the pre-class, in-class and post-class learning stages. An experiment with the blended model was carried out in one of the author’s College English classes of 28 students for a whole semester and the experimental data were collected through tests and questionnaires. A comparison between the pre-test and post-test scores reveals that students’ English language proficiency improves after mobile-assisted blended learning was used for teaching. The survey conducted at the end of the experiment shows that mobile-assisted blended learning helps to motivate students’ interest in English learning, increase the degree of learner engagement, and improve learning outcomes. The findings suggest that to produce optimal learning outcomes, the instructor must seek to empower every student to become an active participant in the learning process by breaking traditional boundaries of classroom instruction and embracing new advances in learning technologies. Keywords: Blended learning, mobile-assisted, college english, blended course model, learner engagement, learning outcomes.