Another class ready to graduate
Well, the time has come for another class to graduate. This will also probably be the last class of mine that I watch graduate. I've been here three years and will likely move on to another duty station before the next class I get finishes this course.
This class was special for me. It was the first Proficiency Enhancement Program (PEP) class in the Korean program and the entire class was placed in my department. The PEP class is something that we are moving to in hopes of producing better linguists. Instead of lengthening the already very long 63 week course, we've made the classes smaller. The old class standard was 10 students in each room on day 1. With PEP, the goal is to have 6 students in each room on day 1. The increase in teacher to student ratio allows us to spend more time helping individuals. We can focus on both weak and strong students by providing them with more tailored instruction and homework designed to help them improve.
PEP is our answer to the eventual requirement that students will have to score 2+/2+/2 to graduate instead of the current standard of 2/2/1+. The scores are for reading comprehension/listening comprehension/speaking and are based on the Interagency Language Roundtable standards.
Well, these students have taken the Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT) and the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and we will receive the results in just about two hours. The students came in this morning to do classroom clean up and figured that would help them wait but I cleared the last classroom about an hour ago. Now, we are all just impatiently waiting for the call that the results are in. I have a student or instructor stopping by to visit me almost every 10 minutes to ask if I've heard anything. I'm trying my best not to walk down to the Chief MLIs office and pestering him about the possibility of early results. HAHA!
Well, my fingers are crossed.
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