The Bilingual Course in an American Business College: el diseño, la implementación y los resultados en dos cohortes.
General description of the project
• Title:
The Bilingual Course in an American Business College: el diseño, la implementación y los resultados en dos cohortes.
o Demonstrated benefit to overall student success and/or institutional effectiveness
The first benefit of designing and offering a bilingual undergraduate business course is due to local and regional needs (in the RGV). Once the course is offered and taught, the enrolled students will have a competitive advantage over other monolingual business professionals.
o Contribution to decision-making and improvement processes
This work provides insights to institutional and college authorities on how to extend from one bilingual course currently offered to an extensive set of bilingual courses.
o Usefulness and cost-effectiveness
This bilingual course design and its enrichment with the bilingual COIL experience are cost-effective solutions for universities to develop communication skills in their students’ native and second languages.
Investment in a different learning management system (LMS) is not required for designing and teaching a bilingual course other than for the other courses.
o Use of specific examples, evidence, or indicators to demonstrate success
At the end of the course, an anonymous survey was conducted. The last question of this survey asked the students to list a maximum of 5 words that best describe their experience in taking a bilingual course. Some of the answers were:
• Novedoso, bueno, diferente, provechoso, participativo
• I felt more confident in participating in class discussions.
• Engaging, interesting, learning, fun, and different
• Refreshing, familiar, comfortable, great, enriching.
• Gratificante, retador, nuevas perspectivas, enriquecedor
• My experience taking a Bilingual course was very interesting and important in my career path as I have learned to work with different points of view and cultures.
• Would definitively do it again
o Hispanic focus
The 50 enrolled students in the bilingual business course were all Hispanic, as were the 30 South American College of Business students we hosted through Blackboard and Zoom.
o Lessons learned
I learned that bilingual courses were needed in the college business field.
Technologies
Concerning technology, the institutional Learning Management System (LMS), Blackboard, was used to design this bilingual junior business course. My course included Panopto videos I recorded to serve as a class repository or reinforcement learning tool. I also linked the course to Connect electronic access to enhance the course delivery. This link access allows me to carefully craft a pack of activities to provide the students with interactive activities like readings (audio, captions, and learning performance appraisals), quizzes, videos, and role-play.
Lectures were delivered in person to my students in a traditional classroom. However, during the live sessions with their peer students in Colombia, I used Zoom in the classroom to make it work as an iTV classroom, with present students on each side of the synchronous Zoom meeting.
Explain project results
After conducting research and targeting a sample of 135 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate management courses at the College of Business, we found that the student’s readiness for enrolling in bilingual business courses is a fact. Their speaking skills in the 80-100 percent range were 51% for Spanish and 61% for English. Their reading skills were in the same range, 59% and 94%, respectively, in Spanish and English. Their reported writing skills were in the same range, 52% for Spanish and 90% for English.
This presentation includes the research findings regarding the student readiness for enrolling in business bilingual courses, the design of a bilingual junior course in the business field, and the outcomes of implementing the COIL experience to link our bilingual course to international peer students from South America.
Why it should be considered best practice?
This project should be considered a good practice for several reasons. First, it responds to the needs of the student population, which is Hispanic and has sufficient knowledge of Spanish, to enroll and benefit from bilingual courses. Second, it is aligned with the institutional efforts to offer bilingual courses to graduate students who hold the B3 Seal of bilingual professionals. Third, business students need to develop a broader understanding of the academic and technical vocabulary in Spanish since most of their studies have been in English. They also need to improve their confidence in doing business in bilingual or Spanish with their main commercial partners across the south border, which is less than 30 miles away. Fourth, this is the first bilingual undergraduate level designed and implemented in the College of Business and Entrepreneurship at UTRGV, serving the needs of Hispanic students in the business field.
Highlights of your proposed presentation
The population of Texas, and especially South Texas, has a history of maintaining Spanish while learning English, some of which is facilitated by bilingual education programs (Fuller and Leeman, 2020).
The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) Strategic Plan included the creation of an instance to reimagine education to develop undergraduate students’ bilingualism, biculturalism, and biliteracy in Spanish and English through relevant coursework and formally acknowledge these skills through a certificate program offered through the Office for Bilingual Integration and the B3 Institute (bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate), the B3 Scholar Seal. Students who complete at least three courses in Spanish or bilingual English/Spanish get the B3 Scholar Seal on their transcripts, graduate with honors, and receive a certificate of bilingualism.
Due to unknown reasons, until the mid-term of the fall semester of 2023, no single Spanish or bilingual language course had been offered or planned to be offered to undergraduate students in the College of Business.
Bilingual education is a valuable and necessary approach to educating heritage language students. As such, it plays a positive role in enhancing the educational opportunity structure for heritage language students.
We consider that bilingual education provides students with an alternative set of communication skills that support their values and cultural identities. Those programs serve to enhance the context from which the students make their life choices, including the selection and practice of their professions. Consequently, English-Spanish (bilingual) education helps to grow and opens new paths for personal and professional development.
The Evaluation Committee will evaluate submitted proposals based on the following criteria. Each area will be rated on a scale from 1 to 5 (1= non-satisfactory; 5 =outstanding), for a maximum of 45 points.