The Effect of Blended Learning in English Language Proficiency Courses on the Language Performance of Kurdish EFL Postgraduate Students in Sulaimani City

Abstract

Recently, the effect of the blended learning strategy as compared with the face-to-face instruction in English language teaching has become a popular topic of research. This study focuses on the effect of implementation of Blended Learning (BL) approach in English Language Proficiency courses in Sulaimani city, Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) on the language proficiency of both Elementary and Pre-intermediate level course participants. The study utilizes the quasi-experimental research design involving 104 Kurdish postgraduate students, who were allocated into a treatment group (blended learning) and control group (traditional face-to-face classroom), from these two levels. Thus, the main goal of this study is to investigate whether there are any significance differences in obtained language proficiency between participants of the two groups between groups and per level. The sampling has been taken from the population who were enrolled in an English language proficiency course at the public universities’ language centres in Sulaimani city. The experiment was carried out during an intensive course lasted for six weeks (100 hours) in which the classes of English language proficiency were taught four days per week. The experimental group was taught using blended learning (i.e. an equal combination of both virtual and face-to-face teaching) and the control group was only instructed with regular face-to-face teaching. Overall, the results show that the participants who were taught using both blended learning and traditional teaching methods outperformed the control group who were only taught in face-to-face classrooms. Additionally, the pre-intermediate experimental group achieved higher language performance than the pre-intermediate control group and improved their overall language proficiency slightly higher than the elementary group. The findings of this study bring further evidence and support for the integration of blending learning into English language classes, particularly in the language proficiency courses of the universities’ language centres. This study also has a number of teaching implications for EFL teachers which will be highlighted at the end of the paper.