Blended Learning as a Form of Modern Language Teaching

Traditional education assumes that all students are satisfied with the teacher's oral lecturing and that everybody understands the teaching matter at the same pace and that everybody is willing to study the teaching matter at that very moment. But in fact, this is not always the case. Thanks to the use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology), which has penetrated into the traditional education, these discrepancies can be satisfactorily removed. This is, for example, true for the use of e-learning. When exploiting this technology, students can proceed a course at their own pace, they can decide on their own way of progress and they can also revisit the lecture topics whenever they want to. Therefore, they have more choices when they learn any teaching matter. Moreover, it means that they are much more willing to study and they are ready to devote to their studies. A sequence of well-thought questions might get them also involved in it. And this might increase their efficiency to study very significantly. Nowadays, one of the most common teaching approaches, and particularly in the teaching of foreign languages seems to be blended learning (BL). BL is seen as a combination of traditional face-to-face teaching and e-learning. Contemporary theories distinguish two basic ways of teaching which can be combined in blended learning: synchronous and asynchronous teaching. The synchronous teaching proceeds in real time. All its participants accept the presented experience during this time and can react together. One kind of synchronous teaching might be face-to-face teaching. All students and their teacher are present in the same place and at the same time. Another kind of synchronous teaching might take place in a virtual classroom where all the participants can meet and react by means of different synchronous technologies at the same time although they are in different places. The asynchronous teaching is usually held at different times, students can choose their own pace and the way of receiving information, but also they cannot react to each other at this chosen time. This type of teaching uses, for example, printed manuals and books, audio-records, video-records or online courses. Therefore, the purpose of this article is not only to describe differences between the traditional classes and online classes, but to examine the most suitable approach to the teaching of foreign languages, which is blended learning. In addition to that, the article emphasizes its benefits and demonstrates its contribution on a small-scale survey conducted in German courses at the Faculty of Informatics and Management in Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic.