Managing Expectations and Motivation in a University Intensive English Program

Trends in higher education seem to be affecting the type of student that comes to university intensive English programs, and those students’ motivations. U.S. universities are competing for an ever-diminishing number of students. At the same time, universities are seeing a decline in funding from state and federal government. To make up for the shortfall in tuition and funding revenue, many universities are aggressively recruiting international students, who mostly pay full tuition. There has been an increase in conditional admission and pathway programs, and these are driving larger numbers of students into ESL programs. Additionally, some national governments are offering students scholarships to undertake higher education in the U.S. (and other countries) – most notably Saudi Arabia, by means of the King Abdullah Scholarship Program. Some of these programs place a limit on the length of time students can study ESL on the scholarship. The Saudi Cultural Mission places a limit of 18 months on students for working on their English; the Kuwaiti Embassy allows students 12 months of English study on the scholarship.

What all this means is that we have a growing number of students in ESL programs whose purpose is to matriculate into undergraduate and graduate programs. Many of these students appear to have no special interest in learning English per se – it is simply an obstacle to their entry into a degree program. These students do not want to invest a lot of time in the ESL program – they want it to be over as quickly as possible. Where once we in ESL programs might have seen our role as enabling our learners to achieve their goals, it seems that we are seen by an increasing number of our students as standing in the way of their goals.  

The Problem with Time-Limited Scholarships Given the amount of time it can take to learn the language sufficient to be able to do academic work, time limits seem to be inappropriately short, especially since many students come into ESL programs at quite low levels. On the website of the King Abdullah Scholarship Program, the eligibility requirements include a strong academic record, but there is no minimum English requirement, meaning that you can in theory have beginning level students being given a maximum of 18 months to get from virtually zero to being ready for academic study. As for the Kuwait scholarship program, there used to be a minimum English language requirement but, as I was told on a recent visit to the Embassy of Kuwait, this made it difficult for anyone but private school students to be eligible, since the quality of English teaching in those schools is so much higher than in the state schools. The minimum English requirement was done away with to make the scholarship program more inclusive, but the amount of time allowed to work on English while on the scholarship is unchanged at 12 months. The sponsors are well-intentioned, but their policies don’t seem to be informed by a realistic assessment of the length of time it can take to learn a language for academic purposes.

The policies may to some extent be informed by folk linguistics, and a popular belief that learning a language can be done quickly and easily (e.g. Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur). In fact, I have heard the same story twice from one Saudi Cultural Mission employee: his brother arrived in Germany with no knowledge of German, and six months later he was able to enter a German university. Whether true or not, this story does not represent the reality for most language learners.

 Demand on College Advising Services
At one university ESL program there is one college advisor, who is used to working with students in the higher levels of the program to identify suitable degree programs, help them complete their applications, and advise them on their application essays. She is finding that students at lower levels are asking for her services. The problem is that those students are not in any position to really be able to take advantage of these services. They are a long way off being proficient enough in English to be able to handle a college search, complete the applications, and write an essay. This puts the College Advisor in a difficult position. Should she help them? If she does, they will not only take limited advising time away from students in the higher levels who can take advantage of her advising, but they also take up proportionally more time per student, because they need so much more help. Additionally, there is the ethical problem of helping these students with their essays: if they apply with an essay written at their current level, they will surely not be successful (and so the time used to help them will have been wasted); if they receive significant help with their essays, the essays will not reflect their true abilities to admissions offices.

Students Getting Ahead of Themselves
Many ESL learners seem to think that their English is of a higher level than it actually is. Some students challenge placement decisions, perhaps believing that if they are placed in a higher level they will make faster progress. At one ESL program, a student asked (begged, pleaded, demanded) to be placed in a high intermediate class because a local college had begun accepting students who had completed that level in lieu of the TOEFL – without telling the ESL program. Many students want to be working on the TOEFL test, and in fact it is because of students like these that more ESL programs and textbook publishers are catering to students with lower levels of English. It is possible to teach TOEFL preparation to students at lower levels, but as ESL professionals we wonder if we are doing the right thing: our wish to provide these students with a strong foundation in English that will presumably help them to be successful in the future runs headlong into the students’ wish to get this done with and be out of the ESL program as soon as possible. Absent students frequently give the excuse that they were studying for the TOEFL. Hence, the sponsors’ policies and students’ desire to get to the finish line put us in the dual and conflicting positions of being both educators and service providers.  

Inadequate Weeks in the Program One concern raised by the Saudi Cultural Mission is that because their students have 18 months to complete their English studies, they need to be able to make the most of those 18 months. Many university ESL programs run on a traditional semester basis, meaning that there are several weeks of the year when ESL classes are not available, time that is increasingly seen by students and their sponsors as wasted. This situation has prompted one ESL program to offer a ‘spring extension’ program that extends the length of the spring semester and cuts out the break between spring and summer semesters. University ESL programs may need to continue modifying their programs so that sponsored students can get more weeks of English in the limited time available. All of this raises the questions: how do we manage the expectations of students arriving with low levels of English who need to complete in 12 or 18 months? Do we satisfy their demand for TOEFL classes at the possible expense of learning that will serve them over the long term? And how might we communicate the realities of language learning to students and sponsors?

(This post is adapted from the introduction to a discussion session at TESOL 2013, titled Truth and Consequences: Managing Expectations and Motivation in EAP Programs, presented with Lynn Bonesteel.)