Developing ELP Students’ Reading Skills through a Blended Learning Approach

Abstract

Algerian law students are required to read and comprehend legal texts written in English in order toobtain managerial and regulatory rules knowledge. However, despite the efforts done by English for LawPurposes teachers, students still have language difficulties in general and are not able to comprehendtexts related to their specialty in specific. Two main reasons are at the source of this problem: the limitedinstruction time and students’ lack of motivation. Hence, this paper reports on an experimental studyundertaken with nineteen 1st year law Master’s students who have learned English for at least 10 yearsand whose proficiency level is estimated to be intermediate. The experiment consisted in teaching themEnglish using the blended approach via a Moodle platform. This ELP blended course based on Contentand Language Integrated Learning approach, aimed to develop their reading comprehension. The resultsshowed that this teaching approach was interesting at two levels. First, it allowed students’ exposure to awide variety of law texts and related activities in spite of the low time load allocated to English teaching.Second, it raised students’ motivation as they could have access to many activities in their free time,select the ones to deal with, have feedback and discuss their difficulties with their mates or theirinstructor. Moreover, findings revealed that students involved in the experiment obtained higher scoresin reading tests than the students who were not. The main conclusion drawn is that the blendedapproach combined with CLIL helped ELP students to develop their content knowledge and improvetheir reading competence in a short span of time.© 2018 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).