Background: Rhonda Petree

When the English Language Transition (ELT) Program at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls (UWRF) first started offering classes, it quickly became clear that our international students needed to know more than how to listen to a university lecture and cite sources in a research paper. They needed to know how the university operates and how to communicate effectively with people on campus.

As our first group of students was transitioning from full-time ELT Program students into their degree-programs, they had to meet with advisors and deans in different colleges. They had questions about who those people were and how to communicate with them. At the end of the first semester, some students made the Dean’s list, while others ended up on academic probation. As the students were notified of these statuses, it was evident some of the students were not familiar with GPAs or academic probation, nor the benefits and consequences of those terms.

When our program was small and new, I covered these topics in a disjointed fashion in the reading and writing classes. I found myself explaining how the university was organized into different colleges and that specific programs and majors were housed within the colleges. I was teaching students about positions and hierarchy within the university and demonstrating how formal and informal communication differs.

After a couple of semesters of piecing this information together, I felt a stand-alone course needed to be developed. My new colleague, Conan Kmiecik, and I discussed this possibility. At his previous university, he had taught freshman orientation courses for domestic students, as well as task-based courses in an IEP. We used his experiences along with my previous work in pragmatics to develop a new course.

We designed a task-based course that has a strong pragmalinguistic component. The course meets twice a week, and students earn two credits. The course determiner is English as opposed to ESL (ENGL 140 instead of ESL 140). This grants students credits that count toward graduation whereas the ESL determiner grants credits, but not toward earning a degree. The course was approved through the university course approval process.

After the approval process, the course, Academic Success for International Students, was offered for the first time this past fall. Also during this past fall, the ELT Program was developing a new domestic ESL program. We knew that the topics covered in this class would also be beneficial to our new population of learners, but that the title didn't reflect these students. Currently, the course is again in the course approval process to reflect a name change to Academic Language and University Culture.

Implementation: Conan Kmiecik

In the 2014 fall semester, I taught ENGL 140 for the first time. The maximum 15 students enrolled in the course, and the students were of diverse backgrounds (Brazilian, Chinese, Japanese, South Korean, Taiwanese), university statuses (degree seeking and exchange), and academic experiences (freshmen, juniors, and seniors).

Due to the presence of older, more mature exchange students, there was good engagement with course content and rapport among the students. This has not always been my experience teaching orientation courses, which sometimes gather large numbers of first-year students that do not meet often enough for the instructor, or the students, to get to know one another.

Each week the course focused on a different theme, such as “Getting Involved With Events, Clubs, and Activities,” “Understanding the University Structure and Academic Jargon,” or “Comprehending Academic Honesty and the Consequences of Plagiarism.” With the sequence of themes, I wanted students to become familiar with UWRF and the scope of opportunities available throughout the semester before transitioning into topics related to classroom performance and then long-term academic success.

During each unit, class time consisted of a mixture of communicative activities. To my knowledge, there is not a textbook for this type of course, so I spent a substantial amount of time developing and adapting material for the course. Pragmatics: Teaching Speech Acts from TESOL’s Classroom Practice Series was helpful. In addition, Career Services and the Academic Success Center on campus had useful resources. Because I had taught orientation courses before, I had activities and ideas that I was able to repurpose.

For some of the units, I invited guest speakers from UWRF and scheduled site visits to different locations on campus. I was careful not to book too many guest speakers because even though it is important for students to have interactions with campus figures, class lectures are not optimally engaging and productive for students. Likewise, too many site visits can disrupt the classroom routine.

With each unit there was either a minor or major task that students needed to complete in order to demonstrate or further develop their academic schema. Students were able to complete the minor tasks in class or in a relatively short amount of time outside of class, whereas the major tasks required more autonomy and time from the students. For example, a minor task like the campus scavenger hunt took the entire class period (50 minutes) for students to complete, while I only set aside part of the class (15 minutes) for students to work on completing their weekly and semester schedule. Major tasks like the classroom observation or campus plagiarism survey had to be completed outside of class.

There were two other innovative aspects of the course worth mentioning.

First, the Involvement Center on campus had just created the Falcon 5 Program, which encourages students to become more involved in campus events. Student activities are grouped into five categories: Career, Education, Social, Community, and Wellness. Additionally, there are three levels for all categories. Students in ENGL 140 course were required to attend and participate in three events from each category (15 total) in order to complete level one of the Falcon 5.

Second, I created a closed Facebook group for the class. This is something I did in all my ESL courses that semester. Students were checking Facebook more often throughout the day than their school email accounts, so I had more success with students viewing the information that I posted there than I did with information I sent via email. Because I wanted students to attend university events, the Facebook group became a means to share and remind them about upcoming events.

Suggestions

Academic Success for International Students is now part of the ELT course offering and will hopefully help ESL students understand the language, structure, and culture of the American university setting. While the course’s content and design are specific to UWRF, students in other programs might benefit from similar instruction. If so, consider the following suggestions for adapting the ideas discussed in this article:

• If your program is not at the point where it can offer a stand-alone course, develop a series of assignments or projects that address important academic issues and sequence these materials throughout the language courses offered in your program. For example, students in a speaking class could interview a university faculty or staff member. In a writing class, students could survey other students about their perceptions of and experiences with plagiarism. In a grammar class, students could learn about softening language for different communication situations.
  
  
• If you have not already done so, contact your campus’s Career Services and Academic Success Center. See what resources and materials they offer, and gauge how accessible and comprehensible these items are to ESL learners. If necessary, consider helping these programs adapt or develop ELL-friendly resources and materials.
  
  
• If your program is at the point where it can develop a stand-alone course, here are some additional points to consider:
• Make sure that the course content does not overlap with another course offered at your institution.
• See if the course can be offered for credits that count toward a degree. This will help student see the validity of the course.
• Consider meeting more than 1 hour per week in order to foster stronger relationships in the classroom.
• Develop assignments that increase students’ knowledge and skills necessary for successful first-year collegiate experiences.
• Make sure that the coursework is challenging yet reasonable. Students will resent assignments that impose upon the time they could be spending on other courses.
• Be careful not to schedule too many guest speakers or site visits for the course. These opportunities should enhance course content, not dominate it.
  
  

Resources

Tatsuki, D., & Houck, N. (Eds.). (2010). Pragmatics: Teaching speech acts. Alexandria, VA: TESOL Press.

Rhonda Petree is the director of the ELT Program at UWRF. She has taught students about American educational systems at UWRF, taught in adult basic education programs, and worked as a TEFL Peace Corps volunteer in Kazakhstan. She earned an MA in ESL from the University of Minnesota.

Conan Kmiecik is the ESL and Cultural Summer Program coordinator and an instructor for the ELT Program at UWRF. In addition to his administrative experience, he has taught a variety of courses for domestic and international students. He earned a dual MA in English (Language and Literature/TESOL) from Winona State University.