A group of my colleagues and I have been working together since 2010 on the topic of evaluating what speaking and listening skills that international university students need in order to succeed in American university classes. Beth Sheppard, Jennifer Rice, Brendan DeCoster, Korey Rice, Nate Soelberg, and I have self-referenced our team and our project as NARTs (Needs-Analysis Research Task).

Together we designed an instrument and set out to observe several university classes, targeting the classes which had high enrollments of international students. We put our qualitative observations together and made some recommendations to our own teaching faculty in December 2011.

In March 2012, our observations were presented about at CaTESOL and again at NAFSA in May 2012.

In October of 2012, our proposal was accepted for TESOL 2013. These are the words that most English teaching professionals hope to read in October of every year:

Congratulations! Your proposal titled, “Re-evaluating the Speaking and Listening Demands of University Classes,” has been accepted for the TESOL 2013 convention program, held on 20-23 March 2013 in Dallas, Texas USA. Being accepted is quite an accomplishment; the acceptance rate was only 26%.

Additionally, we are waiting to hear back from TESL-EJ to see if our journal submission was accepted.

Exciting times for the NARTs!