Project Investigator: Sandra Zappa-Hollman, Associate Professor, Language and Literacy Education
Project description
This project aims to investigate to what extent the content-and-language enriched tutorials (CLET) known as “VANT 140” offered through the UBC Vantage College International Program achieve the intended goals of helping non-native English speaking students to further develop their academic English proficiency, better understand course content, and increase their level of confidence. The tutorials represent an innovative pedagogical approach to providing principled, sustained, integrated language support to English language learners studying at UBC.
It is expected that by enhancing their academic English proficiency through completing the required CLET tutorials, as the semester progresses students will increase their comprehension of the parent course content (i.e., the course linked to the CLET), and they will feel more confident to participate in class lectures and complete required readings and assignments.
Project Questions
How successfully are the content-and-language enriched tutorials in achieving the following goals:
(a) helping students develop their academic English proficiency (with a special emphasis on their lexico-grammatical resources)?;
(b) helping students better understand the course content?;
(c) helping students feel more confident to participate in lectures and complete required readings and assignments?
Impact on teaching and learning at UBC
Given the increasing number of international students in higher education, and with the launching of UBC Vantage College, the results of this project will make a significant contribution to inform our own pedagogy but also to address a dearth of research in the area of sheltered instruction in English for Academic Purposes settings.