Abstract:

The paper deals with the issues of developing university students´ foreign language competence in the courses of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) through blended learning assignments. The authors focus on the so-called intralinguistic mediation, which represents a recently established category of the updated Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, 2020). Therefore, the authors aim to stimulate the students´ genuine use of professionally relevant as well as personalised language within an integrated blended learning assignment based on the LMS Moodle, tailored to the selected student groups in accordance with the key features of discipline-specific professional communication. In order to identify similarities and differences in intralinguistic mediation trends across various ESP fields, this small-scale empirical investigation was carried out in two specialised groups of pre-service professionals, representing the sectors of healthcare and transport engineering. The data were collected in two stages, with the initial focus on identifying the emerging patterns in the perceived intralinguistic mediation strategies applied by students, and the subsequent deeper focus on how these perceptions are manifested in the students´ real language production. Accordingly, the interpretation of research results is based on the methodologies of questionnaire survey and content analysis. As a contribution to the current debates on a massive trend of AI-generated text production, the outcomes of this investigation imply a huge learning potential of blended learning tasks based on intralinguistic mediation in terms of interconnecting written and spoken production modes.

Keywords:

Blended learning, intralinguistic mediation, English for Specific Purposes, Moodle.