Impacts of blended learning on the college students’ English language speaking ability

Investigating the impacts of blended learning on improving college students’ English language speaking ability was the primary goal of this study. The study also explicitly looked at how students perceived about blended learning. It was employed a quasi-experimental design, purposively selecting two intact groups of first-year Moral Education students at Hawassa College of Teacher Education. The intervention lasted for 3 months and employed blended learning for the experimental group, which consisted of 35 students, and a conventional learning approach for the control group, which contained 31 students, expecting that blended learning would change their English language speaking performance. The data were collected via pretest, posttest, questionnaire and interview. The researchers analyzed data by using inferential statistics such as the t-test and ANCOVA in SPSS version 27, and the effect size was computed to fix the magnitude of the intervention while interview data were analyzed thematically. The result indicated that participants in the experimental group significantly enhanced their speaking ability and exhibited positive perception towards blended learning. Finally, this study offers a unique perspective on blended learning by demonstrating how tools like Google Classroom and Telegram effectively improve students’ speaking skills. Therefore, English language teachers can adopt blended learning approaches that integrate conventional and digital methods to enhance the students’ speaking ability.