Could it be that the expectations are too high?

Idiosycrancies, idioms, heuristics, and regional dialectisms prevent them from integrating.  Ask your students the definition of y'all, civer, upyonder, down yonder,  up them and down them and that only covers a few states of the USA.  If you're looking for UK english ask them what a spanner and a torry are.  If they can't answer all correctly or you don't know all correctly hollar and that's why they can't pass for speaking English beyond the TOEFL.

-rand

When I was running PG taught programmes with a large number of non native English speaking graduates we had a rule that in college at all times from coffee breaks to students just chatting about work amongst themselves that they had to converse in English. This thus gave them the space and the permission not to use their native language so they them became far more familiar with the idiosycrancies etc that Dr Randy Duckett discusses above.

Dear Ehab,

Your question is what we are asked by the Vice President of our university these days. He wants us to create a miracle that will give our university a monopoly by taking EFL high school English students and bringing them up to a real college level with just 44 semester credits of English and English-based lectures. As David says above, the expectations are way too high for college students who are completing a college degree in their native language. In our case, these Japanese basis students. Of course, I cannot reveal to you our secret plan to create such a monopoly, but just keep watching for my university to crop up as a more and more prestigious uni. If we accomplish it, I am sure there will be many burned out English teachers, or the students will lose mother tongue acumen...

Cheers,

Paul Sevigny

As Paul illustrates in his response the problem lies as much with the expectations of the institution as with those of the learners.

As an English teacher I can list the following reasons:

1)      learners’ different starting point to learn language, which leads to the next reason

2)      Individual differences – ( e.g. I assume for introverts it’s harder to communicate than for extroverts)

3)      Lack of speaking practice

4)      Lack of reading for pleasure/ lack of input

5)      The complex patterns existing in mother tongues different from English

6)      Lack of learner’s motivation, confidence

I really like Tamar's points about inadequate input and motivation. Listening anxiety, ambivalent feelings like, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, turn toward more efficacious activity in an ESL context--like going to office hours. I am pretty sure if you did a study of office hour trips in EFL vs ESL contexts you would see an incredible difference. There is great dissertation/thesis right there for someone, free for the taking.

I like Tamar's list, also.

I note that about half of these things are under the control, of the teacher, directly or indirectly.  Motivation has a correlation to outcome ability, but the teacher's teaching style may not always promote the highest motivation.

Honestly, I think we need to operationalize the term "deliver" in Ehab's question. I think he is talking about success in the eyes of the School Administration. For example, "50% of all Japanese-basis students will achieve a 500 on the paper-based TOEFL by the time they have completed four semesters (24 credits) of English in Japan." Without a discrete, stated result, it is tough to move a program forward. I am curious how other schools define and measure their overall outcomes.

Because of the little exposure to English outside the classroom. Students' experience is limited  to classroom English, which focuses on the formal aspects of the language. Many Arab EFL learners in most countries learn English for 12 years and cannot answer simple personal questions when they join college. 

I like Tamar's list too, but then, how much can an EFL program offer realistically in terms of language competence? Teaching English to foreign speakers should do more than teach about 'how to use' a language, moving towards the practice of living it. Languages are, after all, a way of expressing life. For practical reasons universities which are serious about teaching English should adopt some kind of an immersion scheme (either real or simulated) where students become exposed to real life incidents and learn to act discursively in situ. This along with, of course, formal language teaching. 

Dear Mr. Abudheibeh

We also face the same problem that Dr. Khalil pointed out in Thailand.  Here, outside of class, everything can get done in Thai, so despite knowing the importance of English, most students are not well motivated to use English.

Some scholars here also mentioned a shortage of qualified teachers of English; by this, they mean 1) some teachers themselves are not skillful users of the language; 2) some are not well trained in the English teaching areas.  As a result, designing communicative lessons and organizing communicative classrooms, which are unpredictable by nature, have become quite a task for many teachers. 

Besides, despite the communicative goals in the national curriculum, the official assessment systems here are supportive of grammar, reading and writing.  This too may be another reason why the communicative focus has become secondary for both students and English classrooms.

So here we are, as Dr. Khalil pointed out, not all, but a countless number of Thai students can hardly "answer simple personal questions" in English both inside and outside of class.

Best regards, 

Cameen

"The ultimate goal of teaching English as a Foreign Language is to graduate people who are able to communicate in English fully." What do you mean by "fully"?

I will focus on two of the issues mentioned above: the lack of exposure to English and the lack of use of English outside the classroom . I will also mention a third issue: the overall lack of true ESP courses-i.e courses which address precisely their students' needs.

1) (Exposure) In countries with free access to the Internet, lack of exposure to English should not be a problem for committed learners,as they can easily be motivated to listen to podcasts, watch TV series and videos with or without subtitles, read articles etc. Many of my students, and those of my colleagues, do make use of the opportunities for exposure that the Internet provides, although doubtless they could make even more use of them.

2) (Using English outside the classroom) It is hard to motivate them to make use of opportunities to speak or write English outside the classroom. Such opportunties abound via Internet threads, Skype conversations, opinion forums etc, but I, personally, have had limited success in getting students to use them. One solution could be to include the use of English on the Internet as part of a continuous assessment programme. Students could take part in projects in  which they take advantage of existing opportunities to speak and write English on the Internet or even create new special interest groups in which English is the vehicle of communication. This ties in with Fatima's recommendation for a "real or simulated immersion scheme".

3) ( Lack of truly specific teaching programmes)One problem that learners have is that the teaching programmes are often too generalist to respond to their specific needs. Business English courses frequently, though not always, focus on general skills such as presentations, telephoning etc without adapting the content to the needs of each group of learners. Similarly,  Hilary Nesi has denounced a lack of focus on specific genres in EAP materials and courses .

Why can’t EFL programs deliver as expected?

There are a number of reasons:

1.      You can’t repair what is broken. The current system works very well for children but does not work for adults. Because adults can’t learn as children. Adults are thinking in native language and try to speak in English – it is impossible for most of them.  Language is not information to be remembered. Language is a skill, similar to learning to drive or play a sport. Therefore, it must be acquired through a new type of practice.

2.    The current system incorporates so many misconceptions, which are so powerful; they actually prevent adults from learning EFL.  Misconceptions are explained in the Amazon Kindle eBook Language Bridge Technology: Speak Fluent English

http://amzn.to/1GZdpk1  and this blog http://bit.ly/1hGubJ8

3.     Adults need a new type of input: training all the English language skills concurrently. Training is much faster than learning. This new input must eliminate subconscious cross-translation as the main barrier in acquiring English language skills and facilitate the formation of the English speech center in the brain.

To acquire language patterns and intuitive grammar it is not enough to speak, i.e. to practice what you already know; you will need speech shadowing and multiple repetitions of comprehensible texts to train your brain and prepare it for thinking and speaking in English.

4.     The new type of input is described here: www.language-bridge.com.

It provides the environment for training all the English skills concurrently by working on eleven drills to each lesson; this ensures fluency, better reading and writing skills, and pronunciation than the traditional methods of teaching English.

www.language-bridge.com

The problem comes to down to the fact that certain conditions have not been satisfied. These conditions are things that must be in place for optimal language development to take place, but first of all there are a number of layperson misconceptions and non-expert assumptions that need to be addressed.  

1. Teaching does not cause learning. A program of L2 instruction does not "make" the learners develop in a linear or incremental cause-effect manner. There are undoubtedly other issues at play, many of which (e.g., linguistic, social, individual, etc) have been mentioned by other comments.  

2. There is no pure distinction between learning and acquisition. Krashen's intuitively appealing hypothesis notwithstanding, there is no empirical evidence that allows us to distinguish between these two. A much more meaningful distinction might be between implicit knowledge/learning vs explicit knowledge/learning because these implicate awareness, attention, and conscious intent.   

3. Input is necessary, but not a sufficient condition for L2 development. The same goes for output and practice. What is more, practice does not make perfect if it is not the right kind because language is much more than a mechanical skill. Sure we could talk about repeated performance leading to automatization, but this is not "practice" in the layperson sense.  

Now back to conditions: Input is one major causal factor in development. A precise definition of input might be language that learners hear or read in communicative contexts and respond to for meaning - not form or structure. The first issue is right there, as the language that learners encounter in the classroom often does not jive with this.  Varying combinations of graded and authentic input need to be ongoing from the earliest stages of language development.

Practice (i.e., the mechanical repetition evocative of many classroom activities) does not substitute for input, and even its role in helping push declarative knowledge to the procedural stage is not simple and linear (Skill Acquisition Theory is clear on this). More is not more, when it comes to practice. Instead think of everything we know about how learning takes place in the mind/brain and we must confront issues of salience, complexity, redundancy, attention and awareness, working memory, how input is taken in (i.e., intake).

We still have said nothing about the social factors, but consider that a product model of L2 education is widely rejected. Instead think of what we know about interaction, feedback, negotiation of meaning, and how learning is emergent from these processes.

Now on to inter and intrapersonal psychological factors: are learners in a context which fosters productive group processes, goal-orientations, and attributions / expectancies? Have threats to perceptions of the self and identity been minimized, or is anxiety heightened through built-in structures (e.g., compulsory L2 learning; high-stakes assessment) that prioritize detrimental conditions such as zero-sum competition?  

Although we don't know everything, evidence from SLA research is very clear that L2 development (whether instructed or in naturalistic settings) is complex, non-linear/dynamic, and multidimensional. To treat it otherwise is naive and misleading. 

Your very interesting and scientific comment explains the complexity of the situation but does not provide the answer to the original question: "Why can’t EFL programs deliver as expected?

It depends on how one sees language learning. The fact of incapsulating the learning experience into a program seems, at least to me, an artificial way of controlling the paths of development. In Complexity theory (Diane-Freeman, 2006) learning is a idiosyncratic process and each learning experience is unque despite the positivist research attempts in the 1980s and beyond to draw some universals for the ease to control the direction and rate of the learning course;

I think in learning a foreign language, the learner himself/herself plays a very important role. The role of teacher is teaching the syllabus and familiarizing his/her students  with educational resources. However, the rest of the journey  depends on the attempts the learners make themselves and the responsibility they feel about their own learning, e.g. if they read books, newspapers or magazines  in the target language, if they expose themselves to the language by watching movies, listening to music, etc., their progress will be facilitated.

Hey Ihab

There has been various answers by different experts. I agree with everything to an extent...But for me if is more to do with the neurobiology of the system that is still available to learn the L2 grammar. Kara Morgan Short and Ullman offer some insights for that. 

The simple version could be: grammar is easily learnt by exposure when the learner is young thanks to the powerful statistical mechanism (procedural memory). The mechanism becomes less available for adults, I assume most L2 learners come to classroom are adults. The implication is for the teaching approach, i.e., it is more feasible to teach the L2 grammar implicitly (exposure based) than with instructions. However, this is still in research stage, but I hope this answers partly to your question. 

Ihab,

All conventional methods of learning English exemplify passive learning with a limited success rate and how you may start Active Training of English Skills that is 4-5 times more efficient than passive learning. 

Downsides of Passive Language Learning

1. The major downside of passive learning is that it splits the language into different components – reading, writing, listening, grammar and pronunciation – which you try to learn separately.

2. When learners are not actively involved in the class, they continue to think in their native language. Whatever is bombarded onto them, they try to translate it into their mother tongue. It becomes almost impossible to process the information subconsciously or automatically.

3. Because learners aren’t taught to think in English, they are unable to communicate in English.

Active learning helps learners start speaking English fluently in less than a year.

Active learning is more than just listening: it involves active participation of learners. They must use the language all the time and be emotionally involved in the process.

Transitioning from Passive Learning to Active Training English Skills

1.      The best-kept secret is – comprehensible input. We acquire the language when we understand it. Support in the native language is necessary, but it should be organized in a way that precludes subconscious translation into and from the mother tongue.

2.      Learners spend more time actively speaking English when using the patented Language Bridge Technology (LBT) than in conventional classes.

LBT introduces speech shadowing of pre-recorded lessons and drills that all learners, wearing headsets, perform concurrently. It also creates an environment for acquiring all language skills – reading, listening, speaking, writing, and pronunciation at the same time while re-experiencing familiar situations exclusively in English.

3.     The mobile is an obvious choice for delivering information. It gives learners access to learning material both in the class and after the class. LBT comes with an Android application that is interactive and dynamic. It contains built-in support for sharing sessions with friends or teachers, which is essential for digital learners.

Learning a new language, especially in an EFL context is a VERY COMPLEX PROCESS, and it takes a long time to learn it. Just compare it with the process of learning the first language. It's not true that children LEARN a language in three or four years. What they learn is the basics of the language, then they will have to continue learning the language for many years. In addition, when you learn a new language there are many internal variables (cognitive, affective and physical factors, and be aware of the subvariables that are included in each one of them) and external variables (teachers, students, classrooms, number of teaching hours, teaching intensity, number of classmates, classroom environment, sorrounding community, state policies, and so on) that are affecting the foreign language process at the same time. To understand this process we cannot trust on simple and quick principles. For example, it is true that in order to learn a language you have to understand it (Krashen's input hypothesis), but this is not enough. You have to take into account the rest of the variables that I referred to above.

Thanks Jesus.  You cut to the heart of the complexity of language learning. To relate this to an earlier point I made in this thread, given how complex (and necessarily long) the process is maybe the reason EFL programs cannot deliver as expected is to do with unrealistic expectations.

I do not know why ResearchGate just showed me this question NOW, four years after the last comment, but...

I think that the reason that EFL programs sometimes do not "deliver as expected" is that they do not know what their outcomes should be. When this is true, it is not surprising that they do not provide learning that achieves the "expected" outcomes.

Poor academic program planning leads to poor results, and good academic program planning requires research and determination of outcome goals and expectations, then providing coursework to allow students to achieve those outcomes.