The blended ELT environment and the changing roles of teachers and students in Hong Kong

Year 2012, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 3 - 10, 10.12.2011

Zhichang Xu

Abstract

This paper explores the changing roles of the teachers and the students in the blended teaching and learning environment in Hong Kong. This emerging blended environment has become the norm in tertiary education in the sense that both the teachers and the students are engaged in a combination of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and classroom faceto- face (FTF) interaction on a daily basis. This paper takes a discourse perspective in the analysis of both online CMC discussion forum data and classroom FTF discourse data. Discourse “acts” (Stenström, 1994, p. 30) are specifically analyzed in the data to reveal the multiple roles of the teachers and the students in this environment. These multiple and changing roles are further verified through two questionnaire surveys on the perceptions of their roles among a number of teachers and students. The findings show that in the blended ELT environment, while the traditional roles of the teachers as information providers, knowledge transmitters, supervisors and assessors, and the students as learners, participants, and respondents are still dominant, the teachers are also increasingly putting on new “hats” as expert learners, facilitators, course designers and organizers. Apart from being learners, the students are also taking on new roles as topic contributors, meaning negotiators, information providers, strategic communicators and monitors.

Keywords

teacher roles, student roles, computer-mediated communication, face-to-face interaction, blended teaching and learning; discourse analysis