Rationale

This website has been created to host the online digital content of the out-of-class component in my particular blend for a face-to-face (f2f) English as a Foreign Language (EFL) course at Escuela Oficial de Idiomas de Zamora (EOI Zamora).

Teaching context

The site has been created for a CEFR-referenced A2 course, delivered in f2f mode. The students are all adults —mostly over 40— mixed-sex, native speakers of Spanish with a reasonable degree of digital literacy.

F2F teaching is delivered in a high-tech context (Dudeney, Hockly & Pegrum, 2013, p. 48) and all the students use their mobile phones or tablets under a Bring your Own Device (BYOD) model (Dudeney, Hockly & Pegrum, 2013, p. 4).

Target readership

The webpage is especially aimed at my A2 students, although easily transferable to other A2 students at EOI Zamora and A2 students at other EOIs as there is a common syllabus and curriculum respectively.

EOI Zamora teachers may also find it useful for this level and could collaborate to develop and publish a common repertoire for this level. While not strictly compulsory, the school management team strongly encourages teachers to use VLEs with students and develop interactive activities for homework practice. 

The webpage might also be useful for other Spanish-speaking A2 English learners on the web interested in self-access resources for practice of form and listening skills. However, it is not meant to be a complete course and lacks guidance and depth to exert any significative influence on their communicative competence. Other teachers could find it useful to refer the webpage to their students for specific aspects, use some of the activities during in-class sessions or gain inspiration to design activities especially adapted to their students’ needs.

The name of this website is 'A2 in the cloud: LOTS in English for A2 learners'. The metaphor, valued to explore teachers' approaches to teaching (Roberts, 1998, p. 265), refers to Lower Order Thinking Skills, whose practice is the object of this digital out-of-class component stored in a Google cloud, as something valuable and positive. Clouds evoke neutral tones with soft hues, which I have found adequate for this website theme.

The right blend

Teaching is blending in the wider sense (approaches and techniques, teacher roles, etc.). It is about integrating in-class and out-of-class activities or striking the right balance between the f2f and the technological component. Sharma defines it as the combination of 'the best of the taught element of a course with the benefits of technology, so that [...] better learning outcomes can be achieved’ (in Tomlinson and Whittaker, 2011, p. 14). Adequacy of purpose, complementarity, and seamless integration between the two components are of the essence for the blend to be successful.

Flipping the class, LOTS and the SAMR Model

Bloom's lower-order thinking skills (LOTS) (in Tomlinson & Whittaker, 2011, p. 7) are considered as more 'passive' than higher-order thinking skills (HOTS). Traditionally,  plenty of time was devoted to the practice of receptive skills in the classroom, leaving little space for more cognitively demanding tasks. 'Remembering', 'Understanding' and 'Applying' are necessary to prepare students for HOTS. If taken out of the class and made accessible to students technologically, greater flexibility and student centredness is possible.

According to the SAMR model, when technology is used to generate information transmission or drill-and-practice activities, the result is an enhancement of the activity (Puentedura in Dudeney et al., 2013). Most of the activities on this website imply an 'augmentative use of technology', aimed at acquiring a correct pronunciation and consolidation of the linguistic system. 

Scaffolding 

In order to become independent learners, individuals need support and active help from other people. O'Malley and Chamot (in Williams & Burden, 1997, p. 162) portray 'scaffolding' as a gradually disappearing support bridging the gap between the presentation of a model to students and its autonomous use through guided practice.

As a teacher, I sustain the belief that enabling possibilities for revision, repetition, guided practice, as well as the association of lexis with visuals and audio, facilitate the students' learning.

Use of L1

Because my target readership is eminently Spanish-speaking and presumably lower-level in English, I have decided to use both English and Spanish renderings of the information where students are my target audience. The use of parallel texts may allow for the implementation of Oxford’s (1990) cognitive ‘analyzing' and 'reasoning’ strategies. Probably reinforced by my training as a translator, one of my strongest beliefs as a teacher is that EFL learners benefit from the principled use of translating strategies as these foster ‘noticing’ (Schmidt in Conti, 2015) and ‘can scaffold reading with less confident readers' (Conti, 2015).

This website has been designed to be aligned with the curriculum, and serves as the technological out-of-class component of a f2f course. The blend pretends to be integrated and mutually inclusive. 

The school's curriculum is communicative and notional-functional. The contents on the website are curriculum-aligned, aimed at preparing students for practice in the face-to-face component.

This website is concerned with the acquisition of grammatical and lexical knowledge around a topic, and the practice of the listening skills. All of these benefit from repeated exposure and practice, and are also quite fitting for self-study. 

The sequence of activities on each 'topic' page is arranged to ascend from GRAMMAR NOTE ('Remember) through the LEARN (remember & understand) and PRACTICE sections (Apply) into COMMUNICATIVE PRACTICE, a real attempt at saying something publicly. This final stage on the web is the closest to implementing higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) on the technological component.

'A2 in the Cloud' includes simplified instructions in Spanish, its potential users' mothertongue, as a form of mediating language for students. It aims at gradually diminishing its use in the same way as this process is done in the classroom. The uses of L1 on this site concur with Kerr's (2020) indications of appropriate use of L1 in the ELT classroom for 'instructions and metalanguage'. 

The following are the findings and insights gained after piloting this website of my A2 students and analysing the data collected in a questionnaire:

Navigation

Arguably, the most revealing result concerns users’ orientation within the topic webpages, especially in the longest one: ‘Countries & Nationalities’. One of the questionnaire responders suggests improving navigation within this page. The lack of a clearer numeration in the index (at the top of the page) is said to create a disorienting effect. The index, created within Google Sites, is indeed not very user-friendly. This could be put down partly to the limited nature of the index in-built feature in Google Sites, partly to my lack of familiarity with the features of ‘heading levels’ and ‘heading styles’ upon creation of the webpage.

 I have now changed the levels of the first block of contents in ‘Countries & Nationalities’ to better represent the hierarchy of relationships among them. I had not done this before because the default styles for the heading, sub-heading and minor heading were not appealing or resulted in a harmonious blend. I know now that the styles are not fixed and can be edited.

To improve clarity, the page ‘Countries & Nationalities’ should be split into two, and follow a symmetric structure, identical to ‘Jobs & Occupations’. The sections to include would be: ‘Introduction’, ‘Grammar note’, ‘Learn’, ‘Practice’, and ‘Communicative Practice’. Additionally, all the sections and activities should be numbered to show the sequence following a clear scheme (1, 1.1, 1.2 or A, A.1, A.2…). All the pages under ‘Topics for A2’ would adopt a common template to foster coherence across the site.

Homepage

One of the student responders has indicated that ‘the pages should have ‘more buttons’ to navigate from one subsection to the other. This can be solved by creating a button with a link to the required page by means of the page picker on a hidden page. Then, the button is copied and pasted on the same page where we want to create a top-of-page link.   

Perception of learning

The student responders have shown agreement with statement 4 in Q1 [see Appendix A. A2] ‘This webpage would be useful for my learning’. For its usefulness to be maximised, the teacher should clarify from the beginning how students are expected to interact with the webpage, the purpose it fulfils and how to correctly navigate it. The piloting of the website has allowed me to check that students can apply the knowledge acquired and put it into practice in brief communicative by means of the comment box. The products of these micro tasks are original and not rehearsed before, which serves as evidence of effective learning.

Other insights and reflections after the design and implementation of the webpage: 

At the beginning of this project, I had envisioned a wide array of potential users for my website that I have come to redefine. Google Sites is not the best option to create a more professional webpage, open to the public, and easily searchable on search engines such as Google (https://www.google.es/) or Yahoo (https://www.yahoo.com/). Its affordances are good enough to generate a solid digital component for a given class or same-level courses in a certain educational institution. It offers ‘a tailored solution’ (Tomlinson & Whittaker, 2011) for the specific needs detected by the individual teacher or school. If well-designed, it may allow for greater flexibility and student-led learning. At school level, the use of Google Sites may also grant sustainability (Tomlinson & Whittaker, 2011, p. 181):

o     ‘stability’ of content and interactive activities generated in a common effort of the teaching staff;

o      ‘instructor fit’, relative straightforwardness of use and implementation, especially when compared with other options for website creation;

o   ‘cost effectiveness’, as it is free to run and maintain.

However, if as an individual teacher I would wish to expand the reach of my website for a wider audience of potential A2 learners and teachers outside my organisation, a different webpage generator should be used. The reasons for this would have to do with web visibility and ‘goal direction’ —what its potential users would ultimately need the website for (Tomlinson & Whittaker, 2011). I have become aware of the difficulty to find it if not using its URL, which would greatly assist in reaching a greater audience. However, the process of indexing a webpage created with Google Sites on search engines such as Google or Bing is complex, and implies more expert knowledge (HTML coding, domain building, subdomain creation, web analytics tools, etc.) than I possess. 

A totally different website should be built to cater for the goals and needs of an ampler audience. The goal orientation of this website seems adequate for my teaching context —students, colleagues teaching the same level at EOI Zamora or other EOIs across Spain— but is unlikely to be used in a wider context.

Conti, G. (2015) ‘Parallel texts —How they can enhance learning and effectively scaffold reading proficiency development’,The Language Gym. Available at: https://gianfrancoconti.com/2015/06/07/870/ (Accessed 26 February 2023) 

Dudeney G., Hockly, N., & Pegrum M. (2013) Digital Literacies: Research and Resources in Language Teaching. New York: Routledge [Online] Available at: https://leer.amazon.es/?asin=B00KQOA7XA&ref_=kwl_kr_iv_rec_1  (Accessed: 26 February 2023) 

Kerr, P. (2019)The Use of L1 in English Language Teaching. Part of the Cambridge Papers in ELT series. [pdf] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available at: http://cambridge.org/cambridge-papers-elt  (Accessed 26 February 2023) 

Kerr, P. (2020). Flipped learning. Part of the Cambridge Papers in ELT series. [pdf] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available at: http://cambridge.org/cambridge-papers-elt  (Accessed 26 February 2023)

Oxford, R. L. (1990) Language Learning Strategies: What Every Teacher Should Know. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. 

Roberts, J. (1998) Language Teacher Education. New York: Routledge.

Tomlinson, B. & Whittaker, C. (2011) Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation [Online] Available at: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/pub_D057_Blended%20learning_FINAL_WEB%20ONLY_v2.pdf (Accessed 26 February 2023)