An introduction to a virtual resource center in a blended language learning program for business English courses at a French University

Ti u ban 5:

ng d ng công ngh và thi t b trong gi ng d y và nghiên c u v ngo i ng

GIỚI THIỆU TRUNG TÂM HỌC LIỆU ẢO
THUỘC CHƯƠNG TRÌNH HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ KẾT HỢP THEO NHIỆM VỤ
DÀNH CHO CHƯƠNG TRÌNH TIẾNG ANH THƯƠNG MẠI
TẠI MỘT TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC THUỘC CỘNG HOÀ PHÁP
Ngô Th Ph
ơng Lê, Rebecca Starkey-Perret
Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ, Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội
Tóm t t: Tham luận này mong muốn giới thiệu

Abstract:

This

contribution

focuses

on

an

trung tâm học liệu ảo ñược thiết kế như một phần của

introduction to a virtual resource center which was

chương trình dạy và học kết hợp theo nhiệm vụ (Task-

developed as part of a task-based, blended language

based, blended language learning) dành cho khóa học

learning and teaching program for Business English

Tiếng Anh thương mại tại Đại học Nantes, Cộng hòa

courses at the University of Nantes, France. The

Pháp. Trung tâm học liệu là một không gian tự học
nhằm cung cấp các hình thức bài tập tập trung vào
hình thức (focus on form) liên quan tới các chủ ñề trong
chương trình giảng dạy Tiếng Anh thương mại. Những
bài tập này tạo ñiều kiện cho sinh viên tiếp xúc với
những phản ánh siêu ngôn ngữ và bài tập thực hành
dựa trên ngữ cảnh, cũng như ñáp ứng những nhu cầu

resource center is a self-access training space
providing students with various types of focus on form
exercises relating to the themes studied in the
Business language curriculum. These micro-tasks offer
students necessary opportunities for meta-linguistic
reflection and contextualized language practice, as well

khác nhau của sinh viên. Những thay ñổi sẽ ñược thực

as

cater

for

individual

differences.

Further

hiện ñối với trung tâm học liệu dựa trên phương pháp

developments will be made to the resource center by

học hướng dữ liệu (data-driven learning approach)

modify the grammar explanations part based on the

nhằm ñiều chỉnh phần hướng dẫn ngữ pháp cũng như

data-driven learning approach as well as uploading

cung cấp thêm các tiểu nhiệm vụ liên quan giúp sinh

more related micro-tasks with the hope to help students

viên cải thiện thực sự chính xác khi sử dụng ngôn ngữ.

improve their language accuracy.

AN INTRODUCTION TO A VIRTUAL RESOURCE CENTER IN A
BLENDED LANGUAGE LEARNING PROGRAM

FOR BUSINESS ENGLISH COURSES
AT A FRENCH UNIVERSITY
Introduction
The virtual resource center (VRC) was
developed as part of a task-based, blended
language learning and teaching program (Ellis,
2008; Willis & Willis, 2007) for Business English
courses at the University of Nantes which was
implemented in 2008 to deal with overcrowded
and mixed-ability classes as well as to reduce
student drop-out rates. The VRC is a self-access
training space that currently provides nearly 200
micro-tasks supporting individual meta-linguistic
reflection and contextualized language practice
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(Bertin & Narcy-Combes, J.-P, 2012; Bertin,
Gravé & Narcy-Combes, J.-P., 2010). Teachers
gave students individual feedback on their
productions and sent them to the virtual resource
center in order to facilitate noticing (Schmidt,
2001) and practice.
The Context
Languages and International Trade at the
University of Nantes is a three-year undergraduate
program that combines the learning of up to 2 or 3
languages, of which Business English is
compulsory. Although the number of students’

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enrollment increased by 29% between 2008 and
2010, the drop-out rate is at the end of the first
year is relatively high, at more than 40%.
Another problem of the Business English
courses is that teachers have to deal with large
size classes of from 45 to 60 students per class.
Moreover, the students’ language levels are
heterogeneous, with only 25% students acquire B2
level as required on entering university,
(McAllister, Narcy-Combes M.F, Starkey-Perret,
2012). The large size, heterogeneous class is
believed to be a contributing factor that leads to
increasing drop-out rate, because individual
feedback, student interaction and practice are not
adequate in these conditions.
With the hope to tackle the problems, a taskbased blended language learning and teaching
program including a virtual resource center was
developed. The program is aimed at increasing
students’ engagements in class and helping them
to improve their language proficiency based on
their individual needs. In this paper, we only focus
on the advantages and limits of the virtual
resource center, which is an integral part of the
task-based blended language learning program.
The design of the virtual resource center
In general, the task-based blended language
learning program is developed based on the socioconstructivist
and

cognitivist
approaches,
according to which learners are active constructers
of their learning through social interaction and
individual involvement and reflection (Kintsch,
2009; Lantolf, 2000; Little, 2007 as cited in
McAllister et.al., 2012); and human learning
happens through mental processes such as
attention and perception, learning and memory,
thinking and reasoning, decision making and
problem solving, (Eysenck, 2001). The processing

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of information that occurs in human mind is
similar to that in computers –information gets into
the brain, going through a sequential series of
processing stages; and through practice, the
information can be maintained in the short-term
memory or transferred to the long-term memory to
be retrieved in the future, (Eysenck, 2001; Ellis,
2008; Bertin et.al, 2010).
With that respect, throughout the Business
English course, students are provided with macro
social tasks, which are designed in the form of
real-life business scenarios and allows students to
interact and collaborate to solve problems without
any direct inference from the teacher. After
producing the language through the macro-tasks,
students receive individual feedback from teachers

and they can log on to the VRC to work on their
own problems (which might be pointed out by
their teacher).
The VRC, which contains interactive grammar,
vocabulary, and listening exercises to help
students work on the morpho-syntactic, phonetic,
and lexical areas they have most difficulty with.
These are contextualized exercises (micro-tasks)
relating to the themes studied in the Business
language curriculum. In total, there are
approximately 200 micro-tasks in different
categories uploaded on the center. Students can
use search function to find exercises that they
need. Besides, there is a section for grammar
explanations in alphabetical order from which
students can find clear explanations (which is a
focus on form approach) for their grammatical
problems. These grammar points are linked with
grammar exercises so as students can practice
right after they are exposed with the declarative
metalinguistic knowledge.

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Ti u ban 5:

ng d ng công ngh và thi t b trong gi ng d y và nghiên c u v ngo i ng

Coherent with cognitive accounts of second

language acquisition, the VRC provides necessary
opportunities for meta-reflection and individual
practice (Bertin and Narcy-Combes, J.-P., 2012;
Bertin, Gravé, & Narcy-Combes, 2010) by
offering students various types of focus on form
exercises after having had their attention drawn to
their problem areas (by their teacher) through the
production of a socially and communicatively
meaningful task.

This particular example of an exercise was
made using hot-potatoes. There's an easy html
code to use to integrate a listening document. This
exercise is aimed at bringing students' attention to
specific collocations such as 'to pay attention' ' to
learn a lesson', 'to lay blame', to lay down
guidelines' so that they will learn them as fixed
704

The benefits and limits of the VRC
The VRC offers students with various
opportunities to practice; with a connected
computer, they can log on to the center at any time
to work on their language problems. Micro-tasks
are linked together so that students can practice
the language input they learn again and again.
Let’s take a look at a listening task below:

chunks. The noticing is done when students fill in
those gaps while listening to the auditory input.

Then they have another exercise to practice using
those expressions again.
In short, by completing micro-tasks, students
can enhance their attention to salient features of


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L2 input and memorize them. Gradually, learners’
declarative knowledge will become more
automatic and begin to be incorporated into
procedural knowledge, which can be retrieved in
the future, (Ellis, 2008; Bertin et.al, 2010). The
noticing process is important as “attention is
necessary for all aspects of L2 learning”, Schmidt
(2001:3), and it is believed that “little learning of
new linguistics material from input is possible
without attended processing.” (Ellis, 2008:266).
The VRC allows teachers to draw students’
attention to particular language problems that they
have. During the course, students have to upload
their written work on Moodle, the computermediated platform for correction and individual
feedback, through which students’ specific
problems are pointed out. By doing so, students’
attention is focused on specific language
structures when they log on to the center for
practice. This process of learning enables the
effective language acquisition as Schmidt
(2001:13) claims that “only those features of
target structure that are noticed will be learnt” and

that “attention must be specifically focused”.
The VRC also caters for individual differences
in language learning. Students can log on to the
center for individual training based on individual
needs. Students differ in language aptitude,
cognitive and learning style, language learning
strategies, and motivation, which are predictors to
second language learning success, (Dornyei and
Skehan, 2008). The center allows students to
adapt the language practice to their cognition
process, which will facilitate the acquisition of L2.
However, despite its advantages, the VRC
remains underdeveloped compared to the
recommendations provided by cognitive accounts
of language acquisition. The most important thing
is that the center has not yet comprised a very
large number of exercises for each exemplar in
order to make language associations become
automatic. This is due to limitations found in less
well-resourced universities: lack of funding to hire
full-time developers, lack of time due to high

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teaching loads and increased administrative tasks
for associate professors and full-time teachers.
Besides, as the center is built based on the
platform Moodle, providing sufficient, appropriate
feedback and interactions is the biggest challenge
for the teachers.

Future developments
In the future, the researchers will take further
actions to develop the VRC by following the
corpus-based learning approach.
Corpus-based learning is an approach in which
learners can use corpus data to further their
language learning, (Boulton, 2010). The key
pedagogical approach in corpus-based learning is
data-driven learning (DDL), a term coined by Tim
Johns, who describes DDL as “the attempt to cut
out the middleman as far as possible and to give
direct access to the data”, (1991:30). In this
approach, learners are exposed to large quantities
of authentic data, through which they play an
active role in acquiring the language by observing,
classifying and generalizing the language patterns.
This approach is chosen to develop the center
for three main reasons: The DDL approach helps
learners to acquire a language by discovering the
patterns of the language use. Learners are
provided with a concordance of language items
from which they are presented with multiple
samples of the same items. This helps learners to
identify the patterns, analyze them so as to
generalize the language use. In this approach,
learners are confronted with authentic resources of
language input, which allows learners to observe
what is written in a given circumstance. Moreover,
it is believed that as learners learn to observe and
make generalizations, they develop more

autonomy; and this process promotes noticing and
grammar-consciousness raising.
The overall goal is to provide learners with
concordance lines of language items in which key
words appear in contexts; they will need to
observe, classify, then identify and finally make
generalizations to account for the patterns.
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Ti u ban 5:

ng d ng công ngh và thi t b trong gi ng d y và nghiên c u v ngo i ng

Below is an example of concordances lines
retrieved from the British National Corpus. These
lines present the whole set of formulaic sequences
in which the word “increase” appears. The

repetition of those chunks in the language input
not only helps students to easily figure out the
formulaic patterns of language but also remember
them better.

Boulton (2010) suggests a variety of activities
based on authentic data in the form of individual
or multiple concordances, including:

[ from University of
Birmingham,

BNC
Web
[]
from
Lancaster
University, or COCA, the Corpus of
Contemporary American English. The corpora of
these resources contain written texts such as
newspaper and magazine articles, works of fiction
and nonfiction, as well as writing from scholarly
journals. They also have a small portion of spoken
transcripts
from
informal
conversations,
government proceedings, and business meetings.

• identifying and underlining target items
• cloze and other forms of completion
exercises
• choosing the right form in context; putting
bare items in the appropriate form (e.g. tense,
aspect, countability)
• correcting inappropriate forms
•

Conclusions

matching split sentences

• re-arranging items
• word-formation
• question/answer (e.g. what’s the difference
between X and Y? or what do X and Y have in
common?)
• grouping lines according to meaning, usage,
etc.
• writing
examples

sentences

or

inventing

new

In the future, we will exploit the available
corpora
data
such
as
BYU-BNC
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The VRC has been in use as an integral part of
the task-based, blended learning program for
Business English courses for nearly 6 years and it
has received positive feedback from students,

(Starkey-Perret and Ngo, 2014). Following
cognitivist approach to second language learning,
the VRC offers students with various
opportunities for meta-reflection and practice as
well as cater for individual differences. By
engaging in the virtual resource center for
practicing, students will be able to focus their
attention to specific problems and better memorize
salient features of L2. The center is now


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undergoing further developments with the
application of corpus linguistics approach so as to
help students improve their language accuracy.
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computer out of the equation. Language Learning,
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4. Dornyei, Z. and Skehan, P., (2008). Individual
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Doughty and M. H Long, (eds). The Handbook of
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Blackwell Publishing.
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7. Johns, T. (1991b), ‘From printout to handout:
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