HOW BLENDED LEARNING CLOSES THE LANGUAGE GAP
BETWEEN NATIVE STUDENTS AND SPANISH LANGUAGE
LEARNERS
Pablo Ortega Gil and Francisco Arcos García
Department of English Philology, Arts Faculty, University of Alicante, Campus de Sant Vicent del Raspeig
Apartado de correos 99, E-3080 Alicante, Spain
Keywords: Spanish language learners, Immigration, Blended learning, Learning Management System, Moodle,
Interaction.
Abstract: Children of immigrant families with little or no knowledge of Spanish are referred to as Spanish language
learners (SLL). During their first year in Spain, they spend some hours in pullout groups for learning the
language, but many of them do not develop academic Spanish even after four or five years of schooling. As
a supplement to those pullout groups and special programs, interactive tasks (integrated in a Learning
Management System LMS such as Moodle) can greatly improve the linguistic abilities of SLLs for a
number of reasons. First, these tasks often include recordings of academic Spanish. Second, some of these
tasks involve working cooperatively with several native speakers. Finally, interactive tasks within an LMS
can be done outside the limited framework of school time because they are open and ready to be used
24/365 days a year. The article provides details of an LMS for SLLs being actually used at a secondary
school. The school had 15 SLL students enrolled in an experimental project involving the LMS while
another group of 15 SLL students went on doing the traditional pullout groups. The results show that those
in the first group have learnt faster and deeper than those in the second one.
1 SPANISH LANGUAGE
LEARNERS
The last decade has seen a surge in immigration.
Whole families have left their countries and moved
to Western countries in search of better
opportunities. The children of these families join
their new schools sometimes without any knowledge
of the language in which instruction is given. This
has happened very frequently in South Eastern Spain
as a consequence of unprecedented economic
expansion, where some secondary schools have had
up to 30% of Spanish language learners (SLL).
Although some of these newly arrived students came
from Spanish speaking countries in Central or South
America, most were originally from Morocco, from
Eastern European countries (such as Romania,
Bulgaria, Ukraine or Russia), and also from Asia
(mainly from China and Pakistan).
When joining the Spanish educative system,
these students often face a double language
challenge: they must not only learn Spanish but also
the regional dialect (Valencian in our case), which is
used in teaching a varying number of subjects
(ranging from two to eight). With little or no ability
in Spanish and certainly none at all in Valencian,
SLLs go through an initial buffer period during
which they spend some hours in pullout groups or
special programs for learning the language. Then,
they share with their native classmates those subjects
of a practical nature (arts, sports, technology, and so
on) to get used to ordinary lessons in Spanish or
Valencian.
To help these students overcome the problems
they usually face, we used a Learning Management
System (LMS), in our case Moodle. Our project
included 15 SLLs while another group of 15 SLLs
remained exclusively in the pullout group. Both
groups followed the same syllabuses and did similar
tasks (the content was identical although the
appearance of the exercise may differ). The tasks
were numbered to allow for comparison at the end of
the project.
90
Ortega Gil P. and Arcos García F. (2010).
HOW BLENDED LEARNING CLOSES THE LANGUAGE GAP BETWEEN NATIVE STUDENTS AND SPANISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 90-95
DOI: 10.5220/0002777000900095
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

2 AN UNCOMFORTABLE
CHASM
However, the fact is that many of these students do
not develop academic Spanish even after four or five
years in Spain. Academic language is (Hill and
Flynn, 2006: 26) “the language of the classroom…
[which] students must master… to understand
textbooks, write papers and reports, solve
mathematical word problems, and take tests”. While
interviewing teachers of SLLs, once and again we
heard the same story: you see newcomers talking to
or playing with their classmates, as if the Spanish
language was completely natural to them, but as
soon as they get into the classroom everything is
changed: they seem to recede back to a previous
stage of linguistic ability, they showed little or no
interest in communicating with others and, when
questioned by the teacher, answered with a blank
stare.
In order to perform well at school, SLLs must
master academic Spanish. When they fail to do so
after several years in Spain, the gap between them
and their peers widens and widens until it becomes
insurmountable. Then, there is a second fact which
amplifies the one just explained (Nieto, 2002): many
mainstream teachers admit they feel unprepared to
work with language learners. These are teachers of
instrumental subjects with no linguistic training
who, faced with the challenge which SLLs pose, feel
overwhelmed and helpless.
Add the first circumstance to the second and you
have found the formula of academic failure. With all
these things in mind, it goes without saying that
SLLs are at the highest risk of dropping out. At the
schools we supervised, the number of SLLs who
dropped out doubled that of native Spanish students
(72% against 34 %). It was even higher for boys (81
% against 47%) and slightly less grievous for girls
(40% against 28%). These figures, obtained by us,
offer a glimpse of an uncomfortable chasm between
newcomers and native students, as the former,
deprived of literacy and with a poor knowledge of
the language, leave school early with heavy odds for
a life of exclusion and marginality.
It must be remembered that the recent Spanish
Educational Act, known as Organic Law of
Education, is inspired by several principles, the
second of which is the following (2007: 33): “Equity
that guarantees equal opportunities, educational
inclusion and non-discrimination and that acts as a
compensating factor for the personal cultural,
economic and social inequalities, with special
emphasis on those derived from disabilities”.
Therefore, everyone in the school system is
under the obligation of fighting against the situation
depicted above. The following point explains our
contribution.
3 DEVISING THE PLATFFORM
The authors have written papers on the use of
blended learning for different target student groups:
struggling students (Ortega and Arcos, 2009a),
truants (2009e), youths at risk (2009b), special needs
students (2009d), as well as for specific purposes,
such as homework (2008) and digital storytelling
(2009c). The first thing we did was to bring into the
platform our own experience as teachers of a second
language. Among other things, we planned
instruction with the five stages of second language
acquisition in mind. These five stages, first posited
by Steve Krashen and Tracy Terrell (1983), are:
1. Preproduction, which takes the first six
months of learning.
2. Early production, which goes from the
seventh to the twelfth month.
3. Speech emergence, which occurs between
the end of the first year and the end of the
third year.
4. Intermediate fluency, which goes from the
end of the third year to the end of the fifth
year.
5. Advanced fluency, which occurs between
the end of the fifth year and the end of the
seventh year.
Each of these stages demands for its own
techniques and strategies, and for that reason we
made an initial assessment of all the students in the
project. Once they were assigned their own stage of
second language acquisition, we selected those in
stages 1, 2 and 3 because we thought the tasks at the
platform would work best with them. For students in
stages 4 and 5, more specific measures were
advised, such as one-to-one conversations with their
teachers, oral expositions and accuracy exercises
designed to correct their individual language errors.
Next we established a time frame: the students in
the project would use the LMS for one academic
year, at the end of which there would be an
assessment of the results. The idea was that, apart
from the hours spent in the pullout groups,
mainstream teachers would prepare interactive tasks
for Moodle in order to promote understanding and
the development of academic Spanish. Some
teachers who felt uncomfortable or unconfident with
SLLs volunteered, hoping that blended learning
HOW BLENDED LEARNING CLOSES THE LANGUAGE GAP BETWEEN NATIVE STUDENTS AND SPANISH
LANGUAGE LEARNERS
91

would solve their communication problems. They
taught, among others, such instrumental subjects as
Maths, Science or Geography.
The underlying principle to all the tasks was
schema theory, according to which learning occurs
when we connect the new information being
received to background knowledge or knowledge
previously acquired, called schemata. Therefore,
when we receive a message, we not only use the
words in it to obtain its meaning, but also make use
of our knowledge of similar messages, which is
stored in our memory (internal schemata).
According to Omaggio (1986: 102), “there are two
basic kinds of schemata used in interpreting
messages; content schemata (relating to the
individual´s background knowledge of the world and
expectations about objects, events, and situations)
and formal schemata (relating to the individual´s
knowledge of the rhetorical or discourse structures
of different types of texts)”.
Being grounded on schema theory, all tasks
began with a simple instruction: “Before you begin
doing this task, take a couple of minutes to answer
the following question: what do you already know
about this topic?” The point, as can be imagined,
was to activate background knowledge. Next, some
advance organizers were given. Advance organizers
are (Hill and Flynn, 2006: 31) “organizational
frameworks presented in advance of lessons that
emphasize the essential ideas in a lesson or unit.
They focus student attention on the topic at hand and
help them draw connections between what they
already know and the new knowledge to be learned.”
As an example, these are the instructions given
for understanding a Science lesson done with
eXeLearning:
1 Skim through the text: make sure you
understand the title and the headings; look at the
pictures and find why they are relevant to this
lesson; can you foresee and foretell some of the
main ideas in this lesson?
2 Read the text and select those words you don´t
understand. Make a list. Check your list with those
of your classmates. See how many words from your
list they know and how many you know form their
lists. Ask the teacher to explain the words whose
meaning you couldn´t find.
3 Read the text again. Summarize the main ideas.
Prepare some questions for your classmates. Ask
them your questions and, in turn, answer theirs.
Make a group of 3 or 4 and prepare a final outline of
the lesson.
4 UP TO THE CHALLENGE
The challenge that SLLs pose for the Spanish
educational system may have a working answer in
blended learning. The present point gives a detailed
account of our own LMS.
First, these tasks often include recordings of
academic Spanish together with listening
comprehension questions, which help SLLs learn
skills such as listening for the gist. The activities
offer advance organizers so that SLLs can establish
a connection between background knowledge and
the new information they are receiving. Second,
some of these tasks involve working cooperatively
with several native speakers so that SLLs are forced
to seek information and answer questions in
Spanish. Next, interactive tasks within an LMS can
be done outside the limited framework of school
time because they are open and ready to be used
24/365 days a year. As some of these kids do not
have a computer at home, the school kept the
computer room open and supervised at certain
scheduled periods. Finally, these tasks are divided
into levels so that each student can get the one which
best suits his or her capabilities.
In our case, organization was of paramount
importance ever since there had to be a perfect
synchronicity between face-to-face interaction and
on-line delivery. Every learning object we devised
for the platform had to answer one or more of the
following questions (Koper, R., 2003:7):
1. What does a person or group learn
(knowledge, competencies, skills, insight, attitudes,
intentional behavior) and in which domain?
2. What kinds of activities must be carried out to
learn? For example: observing, describing,
analyzing, experiencing, studying, problem solving,
experimenting, predicting, practicing, exploring and
answering questions.
3. How should a learning situation be arranged
(context, which people, which objects) and what
relationship does the situation have to the teaching-
learning process?
4. To what extent are the components of the
situation present externally and to what extent are
they represented cognitively-internally?
5. How, precisely, do the learning and transfer
processes occur?
6. How is motivation stimulated?
7. How is the learning result captured?
8. How should activities be stimulated?
Over the years we have been involved in CLIL
(Content and Language Integrated Learning) activity
courses for learners of English and indeed our
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learning objects, we felt, had to be devised in this
way; that is, all of the contrived learning events
incorporated the contents taught in the mainstream
classes with a bias towards language acquisition.
Timing and organization was crucial as anyone can
imagine. The idea was to go one step in ahead of
ordinary face-to-face classes in order that these
students had an idea of what was going on in the
class and prepare adequate questions which would
enhance their efficiency both in the Spanish
language and in the subject they were being taught.
The weight was naturally laid on the Spanish
language and, as the year’s course wore on, there
was a shift of emphasis from language to content
learning. By and by their competence in the
classroom increased and so did their confidence in
Spanish; consequently the relationship with their
classmates also improved. After the first two weeks
of training thus, some were over the moon with
exhilaration and were really looking forward to the
next unit; whereas only a month before they had
been haggard, sluggish and discouraged. Seldom
have we seen students look forward to the
welcoming reprise of activities in the learning
system.
Our activities fulfill all of the precepts described
by Merrill (2003: 66): "… the most effective
learning products or environments are those that are
problem-centered and involve the student in four
distinct phases of learning: (1) activation of prior
experience, (2) demonstration of skill, (3)
application of skill and (4) integration of these skills
into real-world activities". On the whole our pre-
lesson activities result in a pick-and-mix of the
models described by Margaret Driscoll (2003: 30)
for blended learning, wrought with the exclusive
tools and resources provided by the LMS or those
“authoring tools” or SCORM compliant programs
integrated in it:
1. To combine or mix modes of web-based
technology (e.g., live virtual classroom, self-paced
instruction, collaborative learning, streaming video,
audio, and text) to accomplish an educational goal.
2. To combine various pedagogical approaches
(e.g., constructivism, behaviorism, cognitivism) to
produce an optimal learning outcome with or
without instructional technology.
3. To combine any form of instructional
technology (e.g., videotape, CD-ROM, web-based
training, film) with face-to-face instructor-led
training.
4. To mix or combine instructional technology
with actual job tasks in order to create a harmonious
effect of learning and working.
Every one of our units took to this learning
scenario with activities deftly crafted and carefully
planned:
1. Vocabulary.
2. Grammar.
3. CLIL.
4. Summary.
Different activities or “learning objects” (Arcos,
F., Ortega, P., Amilburu A., 2007: 2) were
implemented to be included underneath our four
headings, and summarized here:
- Comprehension exercises made from
audio or video clips.
- Comprehension exercises made from texts.
- Dictations.
- Grammatical and lexical exercises.
- Rephrasing and rewriting exercises.
- Essay writing (assignments and workshops
in Moodle).
- Write glossaries for the subjects (activity
in Moodle).
- Digital stories (handed in and assessed
through Workshops in Moodle)
- Create a FAQ for each subject.
- Have a “useful links” sections to be used
in the classroom (Spanish newspapers,
magazines, dictionaries, etc.).
5 CONCLUSIONS
As explained at the beginning, in order to assess the
results of our project accurately, 15 SLLs were
included in it, while another group of 15 SLLs kept
on doing the traditional immersion program. Table 1
offers a register of some of the tasks both groups
did, with individual marks and averages for
comparison. The marks range from 0 to 100, the
latter equivalent to perfection. Nine lessons were
covered, each including between 10 and 14 tasks.
Data for the first three (columns L1, L2, L3) and the
total average (column (AVG) are given. It should be
pointed out that all the exercises were done and
improved in the group that used the LMS (data was
collected in the “grades” module) whereas not
everybody handed in the exercises in the other
pullout group. This was either because they didn’t
do it, or because they missed out a class that day and
did not have the opportunity to hand it in later. Also,
they did not have the chance of improving the mark
by doing it again; something the students who used
the LMS had. Diagrams showing the performance of
both groups are also enclosed below.
HOW BLENDED LEARNING CLOSES THE LANGUAGE GAP BETWEEN NATIVE STUDENTS AND SPANISH
LANGUAGE LEARNERS
93

Table 1:Results of both groups compared.
Group 1 L1 L2 L 3 AVG
Student A
88.44 68.98 81.85 86.58
Student B
85.03 63.84 84.74 84.19
Student C
87.96 64.58 90.31 81.54
Student D
84.4 64.33 85.42 79.42
Student E
88.26 53.58 92.83 79.28
Student F
91.34 54.69 73.31 79.27
Student G
86.71 58.41 80.33 78.47
Student H
87.76 59.98 94.66 78.25
Student I
83.12 60.69 77.64 77.8
Student J
85.98 60.84 86.58 77.7
Student K
81.21 64.62
81.51
77.69
Student L
89.69 57.79
79.74
77.38
Student M
76.53 65.44
77.6
77.36
Student N
86.09 56.19
74.87
77.18
Student O
85.87 61.09 88.95 76.86
Group 2 L1 L2 L 3 AVG
Student 1
67.64 55.34
61
66.59
Student 2
61.1 63.81
98.6
61.97
Student 3
67.64 52.22
54.1
61.85
Student 4
62.82 40
38.5
61.23
Student 5
80.24 39.66
32.67
56.17
Student 6
65.86 29.38
73.13
54.77
Student 7
78.22 36.69
63.5
52.91
Student 8
63.84 37.36
93.35
52.84
Student 9
35.65 43.14
40.56
52.04
Student 10
79 36.41
75.48
51.29
Student 11
67.88 33.97
35.55
50.31
Student 12
59.61 47.86
69.74
49.88
Student 13
35.26 41.83
22.99
46.05
Student 14
45.26 61.48
58.37
44.39
Student 15
48.94 60.5 58.5 33.61
Figure 1: Averages for the LMS group in fifteen tasks.
Figure 2: Averages for the Pullout group in fifteen tasks.
After analyzing the enclosed figures, it was agreed
by all parts involved that the first group have
progressed further and faster than the second one.
We talked to teachers and students, who mostly
expressed their favourable opinions of the Moodle
platform. Teachers said that tasks were finely tuned
to the actual students’ needs and thus clearly helped
them improve their language skills. Ample
opportunities for using academic language in
relevant contexts were provided. They added that
some of the students have revealed themselves as
adroit language users, something they didn’t expect
judging from their experiences in previous years.
The LMS had been received with a certain degree of
reticence, as it usually happens with new tools.
Then, there is the fact that starting off is always
hard: the LMS took a lot of time and effort for
something which they saw, at its best, as an
uncertain promise. However, at the end of the
project, they all considered that the LMS had given
much better results than they had expected. One of
them exclaimed: “Not even in my wildest dreams
did I ever anticipate such fruitful achievement!”
As for the students, they felt grateful and proud at a
time. On the one hand, they were vividly conscious
of their progress, something which boosted their
self-esteem and which made them thank their
teachers once and again. On the other, they took a
more active role in mainstream subjects thanks to
their new language confidence. They expressed their
wish to keep on moving ahead, and now dreamt of…
who knows, maybe even university. Even their
parents came to the school and overwhelmed
teachers with their gratitude, having the impression
that their children were now making their own way.
CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We acknowledge the help and involvement of both
teachers and students at Fray Ignacio Barrachina
Secondary School in Ibi (Alicante).
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