Blended Learning in the Development of EFL Productive Skills: Implementing Web-based Activities in High School Setting

Abstract

Blended learning is sometimes called the best of both worlds, as it combines the advantages of online learning with traditional face to face (FTF) instruction. The present study examines the impact of blended learning (BL) on the lexical variety (LV), lexical density (LD), and syntactic complexity (SC) of Iranian high school EFL students’ speaking and writing skills over a nine-month period. Two groups of 42 homogeneous high school students were selected. One group was assigned as the blended and the other as the FTF group using the Top Notch Placement Test. Then, a website was designed as a platform for the BL group’s online activities and tasks, such as chat room discussions, synchronous and asynchronous forums for writing and speaking activities, and an online task-completion activity. The FTF group received equal but different treatment. Interviews and a writing task were administered at the beginning and the end of the nine-month academic year in order to elicit speaking and writing samples from the students. Finally, the corpora obtained from the first and final interviews and writing tasks were analyzed by two independent coders to observe possible changes in linguistic features. A one-way ANOVA test was used to find out any meaningful differences between the indices of linguistic features in the two corpora. The results show that BL instruction exerted a positive effect on lexical variety and density both in terms of speaking and writing. However, the syntactic complexity of speaking and writing were significant for the FTF group. Hence, based on the obtained results, the superiority of BL instruction over FTF was revealed when the focus of attention was on productive skills.