Describing Students’ oral ability in intensive and regular ESL programs in Abitibi-Témiscamingue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the early 80s, research findings on the efficacy of the Intensive English Program (IEP) in Quebec, an alternative to the well-known language immersion programs in Canada, gave researchers, educators and policy-makers alike a glimpse of the success of such programs in the development of English as a second language (ESL) for students in cycle 3 of primary school. These findings showed that not only were students surpassing their peers in second language (L2) proficiency, they even outperformed their peers at the secondary level who had received the same number of hours of instruction in English (Spada & Lightbown, 1989). This means that regardless of the similarities in the type and hours of instruction received at the secondary level, students who received IE instruction in their primary years did better at the secondary level, when compared to students who received regular English instruction at the primary level. Furthermore, the students’ attitudes towards learning ESL were also very positive and posed no danger of diminishing the learning of their first language (L1) (Lightbown, 1991). The long-term effects of the intensive learning environment were also very positive (Lightbown & Spada, 1991). \nThe implementation of the IEP in Quebec has been met with many challenges. Although research in the areas of efficacy and implementation are numerous, there is less information on the implementation of the program in rural regions of Quebec, where the linguistic environment varies significantly from that of the research contexts previously studied. A recurring question about the program has been its relevance and ultimate efficacy in rural regions of Quebec, where little to no English is used outside the classroom (FSE, 2012; Lightbown, 2014). The current study explores the relationship between the availability of English outside the classroom and the development of oral ability among students in the Intensive English Program (IEP) in Abitibi-Témiscamingue. The findings suggest that the oral ability gains of students in the IEP surpass those of their peers in the regular core program, despite minimal input and output opportunities for both groups in their L2 outside the classroom. Although the study did not make a comparison between the gains from students in urban regions, where opportunities for input and output are potentially higher than what the students in this study have experienced, the efficacy of intensive exposure to L2 in the context of IEP can still be recognized as significant.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".