Epilogue

The Wider Context of the Intensive English Program

An intensive English program depends on the collaborative efforts of a large team of professionals in understanding the lEP’s role in the setting it is located in (the country, the state/local government area, the community, and the institution). In the United States, government policy since 9/11/2001 has been a constant factor in decisions regarding how to recruit and track students during their studies. In admissions and recruiting, these policies must be understood, implemented, and documented. Another major issue in the United States is maintaining quality that will ensure continued accreditation. Having reliable placement and progress score data (Chapter 3) and keeping records on reliable measures of progress in vocabulary (Chapter 4) and writing (Chapter 7) will assist the IEP in documenting compliance in this area.

The administration of an IEP also relies on a team of people who collaborate effectively to plan and implement curricula in different skills areas at different levels. They ensure the appropriate placement of those students in the right classes and monitor the progression from level to level. The IEP will more often than not rely on a diverse group of faculty administrators who teach and supervise instructors and part-time instructors and perhaps graduate students. This mix of personnel helps maintain new ideas in the IEP. When required to explain curricula to new experienced teachers and inexperienced trainee teachers, administrators will reflect on their curricula and make changes. At Pitt, the administrative faculty meet regularly with teachers to evaluate the curriculum and materials and to suggest changes. As a result, the IEP described during the period of data collection is not the IEP you would find if you visited the Pitt IEP today in October 2019. For example, in response to a partnership with a university in Asia, we now have a ‘false beginner’ Level 2 in order to accommodate students who might test in lower than our previous cut-off. This adjustment also allows the IEP to offer instruction to students who previously were not proficient enough for the low intermediate class. The IEP also now has a Level 6 - Advanced in order to provide extra assistance to students who need more time to prepare for academic study. Changes are not limited to the number of levels. Changes also occur in individual curricula. For example, at the higher levels in writing, the IEP no longer offers ‘narrative’ as a genre in order to encourage students to seek more topics they are less familiar with.

Tracking Development: Providing Quantitative Support for Qualitative Judgments

This book has attempted to document how learners in one IEP progressed in their mastery of aspects of English that they might need to succeed in their academic programs or in their professional lives. The book has tapped into a rich source of data, the Pittsburgh English Language Institute Corpus (https://github.com/ELI-Data-Mining-Group/Pitt-ELI-Corpus). Although qualitative judgments of experienced teachers will always be important, we have seen that quantitative measures can also be very helpful in supporting these qualitative judgments.

In measuring vocabulary development, a measure of lexical sophistication (Advanced Guiraud) seems to be the most useful in distinguishing levels in our data as long as students are not given undue credit for less frequent words they already know based on their home cultures. By the time students reach the upper proficiency levels, their writing should be reaching a score of 1.0 or above.

In grammatical development, we have seen that although functional morphology seems to be controlled in speaking activities roughly along the lines of some morpheme order studies, there is nevertheless an effect of the first language. This effect was found in differences among Arabic-and Chinese- speaking learners with regard to articles and regular and irregular past tense marking. At the level of clause structure, it appears that learners progress steadily with complex embedded clauses but that judicious choice of some key verbs and other functors may in the future speed up the development of complexity and enable students to express complex ideas more fully.

In speaking, the data from PELIC, classroom experiments, and additional experiments with the IEP students enabled researchers to investigate LI influence in pronunciation and LI inorpho-phonological influence in reading decoding. Furthermore, the development of complexity, accuracy, and fluency was documented as a set of skills that develop together rather than being in a trade-off relationship. Experiments also showed that fluency could be developed by certain kinds of focused practice in speaking.

Finally, in writing, the data show that learners developed according to statistical measures that were found to inform college student L2 writing. By Level 5, the learners were producing texts with Advanced Guiraud scores above 1 and mean length of clause above 10 when they

Epilogue 275 were writing longer, more impersonal texts. However, some Level 5 students were not being pushed in their output and so the curriculum has been amended at Level 6 to include more academic writing tasks and focus on longer reading texts. In addition, the sampled essays showed that learners need help with varying the cohesion devices and not restricting themselves to some well-tried connectors. More recently, Dorolyn Smith (personal communication) notes that the IEP has started having students in writing classes keep track of their word count and include it in their essays at the end, but learners could also be encouraged to use more sophisticated online tools for this purpose. In Levels 5 and 6, the IEP requires students to note increases in their word counts from one revision to the next, especially when they had received a comment from the teacher to 'expand this section’ or ‘give more details’. Being aware of word count is one method the IEP is using to get students to increase their output.