COMPARISON OF TWO MODES OF LEARNING ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES BY MEDICAL BACHELORS

Abstract

The article aims at making a comparison between two modes of learning English for Specific Purposes– online and blended ones. Teaching specialized English to students at university has always been both challenging and rewarding as it strives to prepare the future specialists for the competitive environment of the Common European market. English for Specific Purposes and its subfield, English for Academic purposes involves a complex network of intertwined components such as problem and task-based language learning, project-driven learning, communicatively oriented learning etc. It requires the usage of many and diverse teaching methods, starting from a change of teaching paradigm – the old ex cathedra method of information provision, typical of traditional approaches, is superseded by a new one, that of the teacher-manager. The new classroom environment necessitates a more individual approach to teaching and a more task-based learning. Students are guided towards working on their own and catering to their own needs in language acquisition. This completely new methodology of English for Specific Purposes was put to the test during the COVID-19 pandemic when physical contact was avoided for fear of being infected and that entailed a completely new way of teacher-student interaction – distant mode learning. Teachers and students alike were forced into this type of learning mode and it definitely showed significant advantages and unthought-of benefits which would not have transpired should the epidemic had not broken out. Two years later with the epidemic of COVID -19 over, the educational establishments all across Europe had gone back to physical attendance, but not without a heated debate over the two modes of learning juxtaposition. Many practitioners and researchers denounced online learning as ill-conceived and handicapping, but there were voices that stood in defense of this type of learning. This paper strives to contribute to this debate by analyzing the results from two consecutive academic years in which learning was done in completely different ways – the first one was in distant learning mode, as the epidemic was raging during that timeframe, while in the second normal, physical attendance was reintroduced due to the end of the pandemic. This return to “normality” did not entail restoration of the old traditional approaches to learning but the incorporation of “blended” learning, a methodology that makes the best use of the old and the new. Blended learning has been around for some time and it insists on the extended use of technology, including tools such as interactive boards, internet-based platforms such as Moodle, Teams, Google Classroom, and approaches such as problem and task-based learning, project-based learning etc. The results from the research show unequivocally that face-to-face interaction in physical presence does not have an alternative yet in terms of effectiveness as far as the speaking skills are concerned. Other skills such as reading, listening and writing proved to be effectively acquired both in distant mode and in physical presence mode of learning. As a whole, blended learning, which involves a great deal of online interaction, proves to be the most efficient way of acquisition in the course in Enlgish for Specific Purposes.