A Qualitative Study on Non-English Majored Learners' Adaptability to Blended Learning in College English: Perceptions From Instructors

Introduction

The China Ministry of Education (MOE) highly values the revolutionary impact of IT on education and has rapidly joined the trend of blended learning (BL) with a series of documents issued since 2010 to promote this teaching mode in various courses. The increasing prevalence of BL also spreads to the inherent social field of English learning since it supports deep and meaningful learning in a more authentic and interactive environment (Koſar, 2016). In addition, the traditional format with teachers transmitting information to students in physical classrooms at fixed class hours can’t fulfill the task to cultivate non-English majored learners with skills to use English, to engage in cross-cultural communication and to acquire high-order abilities (MOE, 2017; Trilling & Fadel, 2009). Accordingly, the programmatic document, Guideline on College English Teaching was promulgated in 2017 and explicitly proposed the incorporation of IT into College English teaching to undertake the teaching reform. Nevertheless, practices show that BL hasn’t significantly improved students’ learning experiences as anticipated (He, 2019). Studies, therefore, have investigated the reasons from different aspects, such as institutional adoption and support (Graham et al., 2013), instructors and course designers (Colpaert, 2006; Ocak, 2011) as well as English learners (Johnson & Marsh, 2014).

A growing literature expresses concern over students’ adaptability to BL, since this learning mode is student-centered and has high demand for the autonomy of students who are highly dependent on teachers in the traditional face-to-face learning environment (Besser et al., 2020). As a result, students making a transition to BL reflect they are challenged by managing time, using new technology, taking responsibility for their learning outcome (Vaughan, 2007), and being socially isolated (Ja'ashan, 2015). The situation in China is aggravated by the fact that English teaching is teacher-centered, and test oriented, which leads to students’ passive learning and mostly memorizing course content before they come to college (Li et al., 2020), and their adaptability may decrease as they progress through grades (Wang, 2016). Numerous studies have examined the predictive role of adaptability to student engagement (Wang, 2021; Zhang et al., 2020), and students’ academic achievement (Burns et al., 2017; Xie et al., 2019), but efforts exploring its influencing factors are scarce, especially in domain of BL in College English. To bridge the gap, this study attempts to explore how College English instructors perceive their students’ adaptability to BL and corresponding affecting factors. The present study adopts an instructor perspective because they are undertaking the role of decision-maker in their classroom (Porter et al., 2016) and mediator between institutions and students (Ocak, 2011). This research perspective might enable a wider and more thorough understanding about students’ adaptability to BL in College English, and triangulate findings from the research with the learners. To achieve the research purpose, the following research questions were addressed:

• 1.

  How well do the instructors think that non-English majored learners adapt to BL in College English?

• 2.

  What factors do the instructors perceive are affecting non-English majored learners’ adaptability to BL in College English?