Blended Learning in a University EFL Writing Course: Description and Evaluation

Though blended learning had been continuously adopted in an Academic English Writing course (AEW) in a key university in Beijing, no attempts had been made to describe this new learning environment or investigate its effectiveness and impact. To fill in the gap, the present paper describes and evaluates blended learning in this AEW course in terms of course design, material development and presentation, assignment submission and grading, student involvement, teacher reflection, and student evaluation. Results showed that the students highly appreciated and benefited from the blended learning employed in the course in varying ways: it helped increase student-student and student-teacher interactions, reduce or even eliminate communication anxiety, motivate them to become (more) independent and autonomous learners, and enhance their academic English writing ability, and so on.