Conclusion and Discussion

Csiec System’S Positive Impact On Students’ Learning Performance

After analyzing the scores of the participating students from four high schools in regular examinations and vocabulary test in Chapter 5, the author concludes that English instruction with blended learning supported by CSIEC web-based intelligent system has more positive impact on students’ learning performance than traditional approach. The following findings support this conclusion.

• 1.

  The scores in regular exams and especially in vocabulary tests of the experiment class were improved gradually, and improvement of the experiment class was bigger than that of the control class.

• 2.

  The improvement of the experiment class with a better pretest performance in Guangdong was statistically not significant.

• 3.

  The improvement of the experiment class with a worse pretest performance in Beijing, Henan and Ningxia was statistically significant.

• 4.

  The improvement of vocabulary test was greater than the improvement of regular exams.

After analyzing the students’ survey answers and interview results in Chapter 6, it is concluded that the blended learning can motivate and interest the students to learn English and especially to acquire vocabulary and listening comprehension. The following findings support the conclusion.

• 1.

  It is easy for the students to participate in the blended learning, which does not require much computer skills.

• 2.

  The blended learning is interesting and motivating, can help the students review the learned knowledge, and can improve the learning efficiency and exam scores.

• 3.

  The main feature of the blended learning is human-computer interaction and instant feedback.

• 4.

  Most students hope to continue to use this system in the future.

• 5.

  The greatest progress which the students made through the experiment was in the memory of new words, listening comprehension and new words’ pronunciation.

• 6.

  Vocabulary learning is the most impressive function for the students.

Synthesizing the exam score findings, student survey and interview findings, it is concluded that the integration of intelligent web-based English instruction system CSIEC has positive impact on students’ learning performance.

The Project’S Impact On Teachers’ Professional Development

Because the original aim of this project was to investigate the impact of the blended learning with intelligent web-based instruction system on students’ learning performance, the research team did not care much about the project’s influence on teachers’ development. However, according to the teachers’ feedback through discussion, Emails and phone calls, it is found that this blended learning can decrease the teachers’ teaching burden, and promote their professional development. The intelligent system can automatically and precisely score the students’ answers, and give the students instant feedbacks, thus release the teacher from spending much time, attention and effort on grading the students’ written paper answers manually. The teacher can have time to do other more important work that cannot be replaced by computer yet. The teachers’ benefit from participating in this project is consistent with Yu, Sun, and Chang’s (2010) argument in language learning contexts, which concluded that a learner’s attitude towards technology was generally positive but that it would be even better if the system’s technological affordances could be manifested by the instructor. According to Fareed (2010), technological affordances refer to those “that support a variety of interactions and their dynamics” and further emphasized the importance of technological affordance analysis to maximize the use of technological tools.