خلاصة:
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.
ملخص الجهاز:
Blended Learning in the De- velopment of EFL Productive Skills: Implementing Web- based Activities in High School Setting Research Article Zohre Shooshtari*1 Saeid Hosseinimehr2 Received: 2020-01-16 | Revised (3): 2020-06-28 | Accepted: 2020-07-01 Abstract Blended learning is sometimes called the best of both worlds, as it com- bines 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 com- plexity (SC) of Iranian high school EFL students’ speaking and writing skills over a nine-month period.
Keywords: blended learning (BL), face to face (FTF) instruction, lexical density (LD), lexical variety (LV), syntactic complexity (SC) Introduction Recently, the power of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has been expanded due to the nature of the World Wide Web by providing learners with the ability to discover, explore, and access online databases of resources.
Several studies have investigated the effects of blended learning instruction on different aspects of language learning in universities and institutions within ESL and EFL contexts (Danielson, 2018; Gilbert, 2013; Graham, 2013; Hamilton, 2018; Layton, 2017; Murray, 2019; Thorne, 2003; Tosun, 2015).
However, the main focus of the present study is to investigates the development of the speak- ing and listening skills of first-grade high school students through the imple- mentation of BL instruction and traces the development in terms of lexical vari- ety and density and syntactic complexity as the main linguistic features (Hiro- tani, 2013; Housen & Kuiken, 2009; Tavakoli & Foster; 2011).