37 / 2015-03-25 15:50:52

Blended Learning as an Effective Form of Teaching Engineering Students when Studying English Language (Taking the Institute of Physics and Technology of TPU as a Case Study)

6178,6239,5268

E-learning, Foreign Language Education, ESL/TESL, etc., Higher Education, Language Education
Abstract: Today modern higher education is aimed at increasing interest of the students to acquire knowledge and to intensify their efforts to acquire this knowledge by themselves. Especially in connection with the recent changes in the FSES (Federal State Educational Standard), a large proportion of knowledge acquisition is transferred to the self-directed learning of students.
These tasks can be successfully implemented in a blended type of learning. The goal of the article is to reveal the advantages of blended learning as an effective form of teaching engineering students when studying foreign language. In our work we consider the definitions of blended learning and its models. We consider the approaches of different specialists to blended learning. Among these specialists are Purnima Valiathan, Rebecca Vaughan Frazze, Victoria A. Fandey, M. G. Bondarev and others. Within the framework of blended learning concept, most modern foreign experts offer six models of blended learning. In our work we rely on the classification of the American educator Michael B. Horn, who is actively engaged in implementing the concept of blended learning in higher education.
National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University is one of the largest leading Russian universities, which enters the number of the five best technical universities in the country. One of the TPU goals is its formation and development as a research world-class university. Therefore in recent years the integrated program of training has effectively been introduced. Within this program the variety of electronic educational resources is effectively used in the educational process of the university.
In the article we present the example of using elements of blended learning when teaching professional English to 4-year students of the Institute of Physics and Technology, TPU. In the course of work we carried out an experiment aimed at identifying the advantages of using blended learning in the process of studying professional English language by graduate students. The experiment, conducted for a semester, involved two groups of students, one of which (14 students) studied within the framework of the traditional learning and the classes in the second group (15 students) were based on “Face-to-Face model” of blended learning.
The purpose of our experiment was to identify the advantages of using blended learning model. The experiment results have showed that the use of elements of blended model has several advantages which were highly estimated by the students. Also, it is safe to say that the use of blended learning in the educational process is effective. In the future, we plan to introduce other models of blended learning adopted in TPU to teach English language to the students of the Institute of Physics and Technology.