E L DESARROLLO DE LA COMPETENCIA MUSICAL

The students in the IEP classes are predominantly international students who hold student visas and move from the IEP into a graduate or undergraduate program either at the same

university or at another university. On occasion, there are also visiting international scholars who attend the IEP for one or two semesters and then return to their home universities. Another small

group includes students who take IEP courses concurrently with undergraduate or graduate courses, and then move out of the IEP into a fully matriculated course schedule. Finally, there are immigrant students who attend the IEP to meet language requirements for higher education or to improve their language skills for non-academic purposes.

There were 13 students in Cecilia’s class, nine male and four female, with a variety of first languages (including Arabic, Thai, Korean, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and French). Ten of the students in this class were more typical IEP students, in that they had finished high school or an undergraduate degree in their home countries and were now preparing to enter

undergraduate or graduate programs after completing the IEP. The other three students were in the IEP as part of an international program that brought mid-level Turkish academics to the US to study and work with researchers for 1-2 semesters, so they were working on research with their peers at the university while also taking the IEP courses. Students’ ages ranged from the late teens to the mid-thirties.

In comparing these students to those of previous semesters, Cecilia saw them as less “fun-and-games oriented” and more willing to challenge her about the purposefulness of classroom activities.

I think they are more “yeah, yeah, yeah, we get how to write a paragraph,” and you can tell that [the students] are kind of chomping at the bit to go beyond that because they’re all trying to get an acceptable TOEFL score to get into graduate school, or something along those lines. (C2-05)

The progression of this course typically moves from working on individual paragraphs for the better part of the first half of the semester before moving into essay writing, but Cecilia could see that, for this particular group of students, frustration was building.

They are, by in large, a crowd of people whose eyes are bigger than their stomach, if you know what I mean, and so my strength was in ascertaining that and then deciding at some point after we hadn’t gone too far into the writing of paragraphs that this is an exercise in

frustration- we should just start writing essays because they are all trying to write them in the paragraph format. (C2-05)

Because Cecilia had extensive experience in teaching this course, she made a mid- semester modification based on the needs of this group of students. Instead of spending another chapter on paragraph writing, she skipped ahead about 5 weeks into the semester, moving to the first chapter that focuses on essays rather than paragraphs. She also modified her plan for writing tasks, which led to more work for Cecilia as she planned her lesson, but a better fit for the class, even though she acknowledged that the mid-semester modification “could [have been] perceived as a weakness but it just seemed like the right thing to do” for this group of students (C2-05). This modification highlights how Cecilia, as an experienced teacher, knows how to integrate change into her syllabus and is comfortable moving outside of her established practices.

When I asked her if she had any concerns about student engagement, Cecilia said that “it’s kind of hard to light a fire under them... there are no behavior problems... just a [laughs] general malaise. I think mostly frustration with themselves... [so I try] to balance being encouraging with giving them feedback that is going to direct them where their particular personal problem areas are” (C2-15). Another concern Cecilia raised was about some students thinking that they had done as much as they needed, so the students “start texting someone now because I’m finished and I don’t have anything else to do, and I’m not going to ask for anything else to do because I feel like texting instead” (C2-17). Like many teachers, including Simone and Lorraine, as discussed below in Chapters 6 and 7, Cecilia has to deal with new technology, such as texting and social media, which can impact student engagement.

Cecilia has several language concerns for this group of students, specifically in sentence- level grammatical issues. “Several of them have issues with word forms and I really don’t know beyond presenting them with the concept of different forms and how to analyze what you need.

When they’re writing, I just don’t think they take all the time that you’d have to take, which is probably unreasonable to begin with” (C2-09). She also expressed concern about students’ use of mixed verb tenses, and whether they would be ready to address the learning outcomes at the upper-intermediate level in the next semester. To address these language concerns, Cecilia identified time as an important factor, as she feels that any class time spent on non-essential tasks would be difficult to justify to herself and to her students.