Blended approach to learning and practising English grammar with technical and foreign language university students: comparative study

Abstract

Blended design of teaching/learning foreign languages, in this case English grammar, has become widely spread within the higher education. The main objective of the article is to discover whether blended approach enhances the process of acquiring new knowledge in the field. The research was conducted at two institutions: faculty of informatics and management, University of Hradec Kralove (technical students) and faculty of education, University of Jan Evangelista Purkyne, Usti nad Labem (foreign language students), Czech Republic. Totally, the research sample included 123 bachelor students. Data were collected in three phases: (1) face-to-face pre-testing to monitor entrance knowledge before the process of blended learning starts, (2) post-testing 1 applied after the blended learning approach and (3) final face-to-face post-testing 2 administered at the end of semester. Phase 1 was followed by autonomous learning from the online course; teacher´s feedback was provided to the students after phase 2 so that they could correct their mistakes, and improve the knowledge in phase 3. Eight hypotheses were tested to discover whether there exist statistically significant differences in test scores between the technical and foreign language students. The results differ according to the students´ level of English knowledge. However, they entitle the described blended learning approach to be applied for acquiring English grammar for B2 and C1 levels of CEFR.