More than Language—Evaluating a Canadian University EAP Bridging Program
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article highlights findings from evaluation of a bridging program for international students at a large Canadian university. Designed specifically for the postsecondary context, the program moved along the continuum from a general, skills-based approach to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching and learning, in which the focus may be on developing linguistic and communicative strategies common across academic subject areas, toward an approach that emphasizes context-specific, disciplinary uses of language. This shift from general to specific reflects the program’s interest in cultivating a more embedded, discipline-specific model for language teaching and learning in higher education, toward an English for Specific Purposes (ESAP) framework. Understanding this approach from a disciplinary literacy lens, the article describes the program model and examines relations among students’ language proficiency assessments, performance in the program, and subsequent performance in degree programs. Le présent article illustre les conclusions de l’évaluation d’un programme de transition pour les étudiants internationaux d’une grande université canadienne. Conçu spécifiquement pour le contexte postsecondaire, le programme progressait le long du continuum à partir d’une approche générale fondée sur les compétences de l’enseignement et de l’apprentissage de l’anglais académique (EAP), démarche pouvant mettre l’accent sur le développement de stratégies linguistiques et communicatives communes à toutes les matières académiques, pour passer ensuite à une approche qui met en relief un niveau de langue adapté à certains contextes et certaines disciplines. Ce passage du général au spécifique reflète l’intérêt du programme à cultiver un modèle d’enseignement et d’apprentissage des langues plus intégré et plus spécifique dans l’enseignement supérieur en préparation pour un cadre d’enseignement de l’anglais à des fins spécifiques (ESAP). Interprétant cette approche à la lumière de la littératie disciplinaire, l’article décrit le modèle du programme et examine les relations entre les évaluations de compétences linguistiques des étudiantes et étudiants, leurs résultats dans le cadre du programme et leurs résultats subséquents dans celui des programmes de grade universitaire.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.047 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it