Developing ELP Students’ Reading Skills through a Blended Learning Approach

Year 2018, Volume: 4 Issue: 2, 389 - 407, 26.09.2018

Chams Eddine Lamri Hafida Hamzaoui

https://doi.org/10.32601/ejal.464204

Cited By: 2

Abstract

Algerian law students are required
to read and comprehend legal texts written in English in order to obtain
managerial and regulatory rules knowledge. However, despite the efforts done by
English for Law Purposes teachers, students still have language difficulties in
general and are not able to comprehend texts related to their specialty in
specific. Two main reasons are at the source of this problem: the limited
instruction time and students’ lack of motivation. Hence, this paper reports on
an experimental study undertaken with nineteen 1^st year law Master’s
students who have learned English for at least 10 years and whose proficiency
level is estimated to be intermediate. The experiment consisted in teaching
them English using the blended approach via a Moodle platform. This ELP blended
course based on Content and Language Integrated Learning approach, aimed to
develop their reading comprehension. The results showed that this teaching
approach was interesting at two levels. First, it allowed students’ exposure to
a wide variety of law texts and related activities in spite of the low time
load allocated to English teaching. Second, it raised students’ motivation as
they could have access to many activities in their free time, select the ones
to deal with, have feedback and discuss their difficulties with their mates or
their instructor. Moreover, findings revealed that students involved in the
experiment obtained higher scores in reading tests than the students who were
not. The main conclusion drawn is that the blended approach combined with CLIL
helped ELP students to develop their content knowledge and improve their reading
competence in a short span of time.

Keywords

ELP teaching, reading skill, blended approach, CLIL, Moodle platform

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