Blending it Early: Promoting Student Buy‐in in an EAP Course

Abstract

This presentation will discuss the adoption of a blended learning approach to aid humanities students’ development of academic literacies in university EAP courses taught by multiple teachers. One of the key challenges in course delivery is helping students understand instructional rationales, as well as underlying ideas about reading and writing at university, early enough in the course for them to begin assimilating target language skills. In order to make the most of limited lesson time at the beginning of these courses, and to ensure students from classes taught by different teachers all understand concepts important to their success in their course, a set of multimedia interactive learning packages was designed and integrated into the online learning management system. These packages deliver instructional rationales in a standardized way, and “flip the classroom,” thus allowing more in-class time for students and teachers to discuss the most salient themes in course learning rationales, and then