The Text-based Effectiveness Research project investigates the academic outcomes of using text-based tasks with students who—following the mission of all current projects at CILC—are studying at minority serving institutions and community colleges. This project measures the writing proficiency of learners of Japanese as a second language and learners of Spanish as a second language, both before and after one semester of instruction, generating new knowledge on how this teaching approach can benefit these learners. We hypothesize that the students enrolled in the experimental class may show a greater likelihood of making functional writing proficiency gains, so this research aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the pedagogical approach, not the effectiveness of the participating instructors.

Justification for this study lies in existing findings that text-based pedagogies move learners faster up the proficiency scale than traditional pedagogies (for example, see Norris & Pfeiffer, 2003). However, these existing findings are limited to German language learning and to highly-selective colleges, creating a need to assess this pedagogical approach on other languages and on a different demographic profile. The profile we investigate is the one encapsulated by the minority-serving institutions of the colleges here at the City University of New York; these findings may benefit similar learners across the nation.

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