The effect of blended learning on the development of clause combining as an aspect of the acquisition of written discourse by Jordanian learners of English as a foreign language.

This study investigates the effect of blended learning on the development of clause combining as an aspect of the acquisition of written discourse by Jordanians who are learning English as a foreign language. Sixty participants majoring in English language at the University of Jordan took part in this study. The participants were divided into treatment and control groups, and the experimental design of a pretest and posttest was employed to test the effectiveness of blended learning on the ability of these participants to combine clauses in English using parataxis or subordination through a writing task. The results reveal that the treatment group outperformed their control group counterpart on the posttest in terms of verb morphology, distinguishing between nucleus and subordinate clauses, use of parataxis, use of subordinate clauses for temporal reference and to structure information, among others. The results also show that the use of technological devices improved students' attitudes to learning clause combining and made the learning process easier and more enjoyable. We suggest that blended learning develops the techniques of clause combining by learners of English as a foreign language, which in turn enhances their discourse knowledge in the target language and positively affects their ability to package information. Lay Description: What is currently known about the subject matter Blended learning combines traditional teaching methods with online digital data. This gives students the chance to engage in online discussions or even to conduct research at home, introducing them to new concepts they can later discuss with their teacher inside the classroom.The flipped classroom technique frees up class time for activities, allowing a deeper exploration of content.The essential aim of this technique is to engage students in active learning in which there is more focus on students' applying and practicing conceptual knowledge instead of factual recall.The popularity of this technique has substantially grown as a potential method to improve students' engagement in class, to leverage technology, and to allow for active online learning (e.g., O'Toole & Absalom, 2003; Reasons et al., 2005; Graham, 2006; Adas & Bakir 2013; Al‐Qahtani & Higgins, 2013, among others). What our paper adds to this Although several studies examined the effect of blended learning as a teaching method on the various aspects of second language (L2), few studies examined the effect of blended learning on the acquisition of written discourse by Arabic‐speaking English as a foreign language (EFL) learners.Those few studies (e.g., Adas & Bakir, 2013) tested their students based on a rubric that contained several items, for example, coherence, punctuation, spelling, and grammar.These researchers did not fully explain how the online material they prepared could have affected each item on their rubric.Our study aims to focus on the effect of blended learning on only one aspect of written discourse acquisition, namely, clause combining as measured through syntactic integration and information packaging to determine whether this method can, in fact, have an impact on students' acquisition of written discourse in L2.Blended learning is relatively new in Jordan, and to the best of our knowledge, no study has been conducted in Jordan to investigate the effectiveness of this approach on the acquisition of written discourse by Jordanian EFL learners. The implications of study findings for practitioners We propose that blended learning develops EFL learners' techniques of clause combining, which in turn improves discourse knowledge in L2 and positively affects the ability to package information.We found that information packaging may override processing effects as far as clause combining is concerned. The way information is packaged in various cases makes the processing of information more difficult. Thus, we proposed that teachers need to help EFL learners establish a balance between these two factors in order to produce a good piece of writing. Thus, we recommend that more focus should be given to this area by English as a second language/EFL teachers.We proposed that blended learning can help teachers abandon ineffective teaching methods, such as grammar translation and deductive learning, and adopt more effective and modern methods, such as providing online real‐life examples and using inductive approaches to teaching L2 grammar.We recommend that this study be replicated to test the effect of blended learning on the acquisition of other linguistic phenomena such as compounds by Arabic‐speaking EFL learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]