The Heart of the Matter: Is This Any Way to Run a Program?

Lou Spaventa, USA

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

Around five or six years ago, some faculty and administrators at my school, Santa Barbara City College, decided to organize an intensive summer introductory course for teaching English as a Foreign Language. Santa Barbara City College is a public institution of education, funded by the tax dollars of Californians along with federal funding and private funding from a College foundation. We do offer training courses to business and organizations for which we collect higher fees since they are not part of our normal mission of educating undergraduate students in their first two years of college. However, we decided on this TEFL course based upon the reports of our director of international students, who told us that he'd been getting requests from East Asians and South Americans for a teacher training course. This is where I came in. My part in this effort was to create a structure for the course, which we assumed would be aimed at practicing teachers of English who wanted to brush up on their language and professional skills.

I dutifully researched short term intensive courses offered in the English-speaking world. I looked at both private and public course offerings, mostly in the U.S. and Great Britain. I then looked at our class hour to credit unit formula and came up with the following outline for a six week intensive course. Each credit unit represented eighteen in class hours, which means that it officially amounted to fifty-four hours because homework is computed on a two to one ratio of out of class to class time. I developed a course of study of six modules. Each module was one week long and was worth one unit of credit. The units were: English Grammar, Second Language Acquisition, Cross-cultural Communication, Testing and Assessment, Educational Technology, and Methods and Materials. At the end of this course of study plus additional optional English-language study, the successful course participant would be awarded a certificate from Santa Barbara City College. The certificate comes from our school, but is not official with the California State System Office for Community Colleges. (We are a two year community college; one of many in a very large statewide system. To give you a flavor for how large it is, our school enrollment will approach 20,000 students soon. There are many schools larger than us.)

The six course intensive program for EFL teachers was approved by our curriculum committee, and we were ready to go. We got over thirty students in our first group. Of them, one had come from Vietnam, sponsored by a wealthy local businessman who had moved to that country. There was no English language study. Our students were a cross-section of adult learners: university students on summer break, recent university graduates, our own community college students, community members, and rehabilitating individuals looking for something new to do with their lives. We had a couple of language teachers and a couple of missionaries or potential missionaries. Ninety percent of our students were first language English speakers.

Since I had designed the course, I taught half of it that first summer along with a colleague who also had a hand in the planning process. We worked with the students for 18 hours a week, doing one module at a time. We soon found out certain things about our student population: many wanted to go abroad to live and saw a TEFL certificate as a way to find work, many had had some living experience abroad, most knew little grammar, and almost all the material we presented to the group was new for them. We kept our curriculum, except of course, we did not need to worry about communicating in English with the students, save for a few international students from Japan and South America, who had a little trouble with the longer readings and faster-paced class discussions, but who, because they had taken ESL classes at Santa Barbara City College, were usually better at grammar than their untutored classmates.

Since that time we have taught the class every summer and we have begun to teach it over the course of the academic year one evening per week from August to May. Given that our student population has basically remained the same in composition, I ask readers of this column, especially if you have had experience in setting up a first exposure to EFL program or if you yourself are a practicing English teacher whose native language is other than English, are we doing the right thing? Our feedback has been quite positive, and we have been successful in building group camaraderie, but have we put the right combination of courses together? Each module is identical in number of hours, yet grammar could easily occupy more than a week. As it is, we do a limited number of topics in grammar: word order, sentence types, tense and aspect, questions, negation, morphology, and phonology. We also spend time in the testing and assessment module reviewing standardized test types and item construction. We have students look at texts and materials in the methods course. We expose them to basic technology such as the overhead projector in the technology course before going to the computer lab. We review definitions of culture in the cross-cultural communication module. We look at child first language acquisition in the second language acquisition module. Should we be doing all this or is there benefit in going right to the material: learner problems in grammar and pronunciation as the meat of the grammar course, web-based learning in the ed tech module, assessment of student progress in the testing and assessment module, cross-cultural issues in the cross-cultural communication module, and communicative methodology in the methods class?. For example, do they need to experience the Silent Way at this introductory level?

I have not asked for feedback from readers of this column over the past few years that I have written it, but I am asking now. What are your thoughts? Write to me at E-mail: spaventl@sbcc.edu. Thanks.

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