Seminar “Linguodidactic Problems of Linguistics”

This research compares two middle years of a four-year undergraduate degree over two consecutive years, focusing on English as a Foreign Language. Year 1 saw 73% of online teaching and learning, while Year 2 saw 25%. The authors compared the relative effects of more vs. less online on examination results. Participants were 105 Methodologists (future teachers) and 272 Translators (n=377), predominantly female (83%). Entry scores were checked to ensure similarity of cohorts. Examinations were taken twice a year. On one course, more online was better on both occasions. On three others, more online was higher in winter but equivalent in summer. Of 24 Effect Sizes (ES), only three were in favour of more offline. The average ES was 0.10 in favour of more online, 0.21 in winter and 0.05 in summer. More online learning was modestly more effective than less online learning. This had implications for course designers/university managers in terms of the degree of return to face-to-face learning.