I had the pleasure of teaching Khbrat Scholars from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) in the Center for Global Innovation. For instance, I taught the Writing for Research and the Grammar class from September 19, 2019 to Dec 20, 2019. This was during the English Language Development Skills phase of their program. In addition, I administered the language pre and post-tests, including TOEFL PBT, CaMLA, speaking, and writing tests.
In the picture from left to right:
- Row 1: Ghali
- Row 2: Nasser and Michael
- Row 3: Raed
- Row 4: Sami, Ahmed, Anwar, and Aziz
Khbrat Scholars at CSUSB: A general description of their English language improvements
From the beginning of their studies in July 2019 until Dec 2019, two terms of study, the twenty-two scholars completed four TOEFL PBT’s, four speaking tests, four writing tests, and four CaMLA English proficiency tests. Hence, the purpose of these tests was to measure their English language proficiency improvements during the English language development phase of their studies. Below are some of the significant improvements these scholars made as they worked hard to improve their academic English language proficiency.
TOEFL iBT score improvements (Low score = 310; high score = 677): As a group, these Khbrat scholars improved their TOEFL scores from an average of 485 to an average of 519 on the post-test. Therefore, as a group, they improved 34 points. One of the students in the group, to illustrate, improved his overall TOEFL score 100 points on the post-test.
Speaking test score improvements (Low score = 1; high score = 6): Three qualified speaking raters independently scored the speaking tests. These scholars improved their speaking scores from an average of 4.67 to 5.37 on the post-test, which is about a .7 point improvement.
Writing test score improvements (Low score = 1; high score = 6): Three qualified writing raters scored the writing tests and each student had 40 minutes to complete their responses. The group had an average score of 3.8 on the writing pre-test, and the group averaged 5.0 on the post-test, which is about a 1.2 point improvement.
CaMLA score improvements (Low score = 0; high score = 80): The group averaged 59.8 on the listening, grammar, vocabulary, and reading pre-test; then they improved as a group to 65.8 on the post-test. Hence, they improved about 6 points.
Khbrat Scholars at CSUSB: Pictures
Videos
Michael gives a brief speech to his students.
Rania, who was in my research writing and grammar class, put together this video and sent it to me by email.
Thank you, Khbrat scholars, for all your hard work in writing and revising your research projects. I have every confidence that each of you will able to complete your academic capstone writing projects by Summer 2020.