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

Year 2012, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 3 - 10, 04.09.2013

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 face-to-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

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