Faculty and ESL student perceptions of academic linguistic and cultural preparedness: Exploring effective teaching practices for academic ESL students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis reports on a mixed-methods research study based on faculty and English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ perceptions of ESL students’ linguistic and cultural preparedness for academics in a Canadian university. Research has shown dramatic differences between English for academic purposes (EAP) and academic disciplines in environments, instructional approaches, and faculty expectations and reported on the challenges and needs of ESL students in academic programs; however, only limited research has investigated how academic instructors can adapt to better meet the needs of ESL students.\nBy surveying and interviewing first-year undergraduate ESL students and interviewing academic faculty, this project examines the gaps in ESL students’ academic skills and cultural knowledge. In addition, the study considers implications for current teaching practices and recommends ways in which academic faculty and the institution can better support ESL students. The research questions were: (a) How do teachers in the undergraduate programs perceive the linguistic preparedness of ESL students in their undergraduate courses? (b) How do ESL students who are enrolled in first year academic courses perceive their linguistic preparedness for their current field of study? (c) What are effective teaching practices instructors can use in the academic programs of universities to support ESL students? and (d) Which are the factors involved in the success of ESL students in their undergraduate courses?\nBased on the results of a mixed-methods methodology, I offer implications for teaching, and provide a number of recommendations to improve the quality of instruction. I offer recommendations around the following themes: online resources (e.g. Moodles for courses); communication and relationship building (e.g. group work, marks for participation, and office hour conferencing); time constraints; language and cultural support services; and admission requirements. The recommendations are based on an analysis of findings in the study and literature reviewed. Furthermore, I suggest ways to improve policy and practice in institutional and faculty development. Finally, I suggest issues and areas for further research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".