Developing ELP Students’ Reading Skills through a Blended Learning Approach

Algerian law students are required to read and comprehend legal texts written in English in order to obtain managerial and regulatory rules knowledge. However, despite the efforts done by English for Law Purposes teachers, students still have language difficulties in general and are not able to comprehend texts related to their specialty in specific. Two main reasons are at the source of this problem: the limited instruction time and students’ lack of motivation. Hence, this paper reports on an experimental study undertaken with nineteen 1st year law Master’s students who have learned English for at least 10 years and whose proficiency level is estimated to be intermediate. The experiment consisted in teaching them English using the blended approach via a Moodle platform. This ELP blended course based on Content and Language Integrated Learning approach, aimed to develop their reading comprehension. The results showed that this teaching approach was interesting at two levels. First, it allowed students’ exposure to a wide 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 their instructor. Moreover, findings revealed that students involved in the experiment obtained higher scores in reading tests than the students who were not. The main conclusion drawn is that the blended approach combined with CLIL helped ELP students to develop their content knowledge and improve their reading competence in a short span of time.