Reconstructing English Studies in South Africa through blended learning

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Facing declining student enrolment, budgetary constraints, questions regarding the discipline's relevance, and a student body inadequately prepared by secondary education, English Studies educators in South Africa require innovative pedagogical approaches to ensure that the discipline's potential outcomes are optimally achieved. Whilst a blended learning approach might assist in overcoming budgetary constraints, research on employing this approach in literary studies education is limited, with the sense of this approach's alignment with 'factual' knowledge often discourages its use in the so-called 'soft' sciences. Hoping to contribute to this field of research, this study examines the discipline's potential relevance, as well as the ways in which cognitivist learning theory's principles might assist English Studies educators, in order to determine the potential means of adopting a blended learning approach in the discipline.As such, the study commences with an exploration of the discipline's potential for developing students' sense of social awareness, critical thinking skills and creativity. Given the subsequent sense of the relationship between critical thinking and literary criticism, identification of the latter as requiring complex procedural knowledge leads to considerations on cognitivism's perception on the relationship between factual, conceptual, procedural and meta-cognitive knowledge. Establishing the need for factual and conceptual knowledge in assisting procedural knowledge development, the ways in which information and communication technology (ICT) might be employed in English Studies education are then investigated.The results suggest the need for strategic course design and text selection. In addition, since a move towards a blended learning approach stimulates reflection on the nature of physical instruction, the increased level of immediacy and flexibility afforded by such interaction leads to an interest in flipped classroom models as a means of increasing the degree of interactivity in these sessions. In this, the possible use of webpages to disseminate factual knowledge, wiki pages to assist in conceptual knowledge development and screencasts for modelling procedural knowledge is established, whilst the need to monitor and encourage students' participation in online activities is also determined. In addition, the possibility of using online 'communities of enquiry' in English Studies, suggest an additional potential benefit whereby developing online resources might serve to establish a body of authorised knowledge, thereby countering a lack of clarity regarding the nature of the discipline.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University