An Action Research On The Blended Learning In Course Of Phonetics

With the innovation and use of information technology, Blended Learning, whichcombines traditional face-to-face learning and e-Learning, is applied in the field ofschooling. It is considered to be a useful approach to accelerate the integration ofinformation technology with curriculum in school. What does Blended Learning mean?What are the impacts of it on instruction? How many models can Blended Learninghave?……All these are important issues and problems.Since the early stage of 21st century, Blended Learning has been adopted homeand abroad. In China, scholars are researching on the literature and theory of it. Thispaper attempts to apply Blended Approach to course of phonetics in university andcollege. An action research is adopted in the instruction of English phonetics, which isheld by School of Educational Science, South China Normal University in the firstsemester of 2006 acdemic year. It shows how a university teacher studies theproblems occurred in the process of teaching, and how she blends the achievements ofEnglish phonetics with the curriculum, thus construct her own teaching model byblended approach.The research process includes three stages. Every stage forwards the problem,plan and task of the next by questionnaire, interview conversation, and resourcesretrieved from Internet. The results find six different dimensions to be improved:instuctor-to-learner, instructor-to-content, instructor-to-interface, learner-to-learner,learner-to-content, learner-to-Interface. In the end, it discusses the general model ofblended instructional design in university and college, proposes some suggestions onthe teaching of phonetics and explores the teaching and learning strategies in EnglishPronunciation.