Blended English Learning at the University in Pandemic Times

Abstract

COVID-19 has imposed conditions that require distance education in the teaching of foreign languages, assisted with digital technology and face-to-face classes. In language teaching, the aspiration to achieve hybrid learning and inverted classes is focused today in favor of motivation and efficiency in learning. From this challenge, in the Foreign Languages Career of the University of Pinar del Río, a research has been developed during 2020 and 2021 in order to elaborate the digitized didactic materials that digitized distance education requires, with hybrid learning and inverted classes. To process and collect information, theoretical and empirical methods such as modeling, documentary analysis, and observation of learning, experimentation, and interview and group debate were used, in addition to the self-reflection technique. Results were obtained in the elaboration of digitized products such as texts, tasks and learning strategies, using stories, songs, poems, cultural and pedagogical speeches, etc. ; all with strong educational, communicative, cultural and humanistic content. The results appear in a digital book for students and teachers. In these moments of the second outbreak of the Coronavirus, the materials developed for the teaching of English in the third year of the Career are fully applied through the Moodle platform, WhatsApp, computers and cell phones. Favorable opinions have been obtained from students and teachers in terms of quality of learning, motivation, accessibility, creativity, cultural and pedagogical values.