By Katherine Gibson (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: January 15, 2014
Colleges and universities running ESL programs across the province will lose about $17 million in funding come April 1.
On December 10, B.C.’s Minister of Advanced Education Amrik Virk announced that due to changes in the way the federal government distributes funding for these programs, academic institutions will now be required to apply for money that was once implicitly given.
But how will this affect UFV’s ESL students? ESL department head Maria Bos-Chan explains that the answer hinges on UFV’s funding proposal being accepted by the federal government.
“We don’t know if the change in funding model is going to be affecting the ESL program here at UFV,” she explains. “UFV’s proposal was accepted for consideration along with a number of other proposals from colleges and universities. But the actual negotiations, as to whether or not [we] will be funded or how [we] will be funded, we don’t know yet.”
UFV should know by the end of January whether or not the ESL funding request has been accepted. In the meantime, the lack of certainty surrounding the program makes planning within the department difficult. Without knowing the exact dollar amount UFV will be allotted, Bos-Chan notes it is hard to give students an accurate picture of the courses available to them.
“It’s very murky. We’d like to be able to advise students. We’d like to be able to advise instructors in terms of what they will be teaching or what they’ll be doing,” she continues, “but at this point we’re not really sure.”
During any given year, more than 900 international students registered at UFV. Bos-Chan does point out that not all of these students need access to ESL resources, but there are many international students who do rely on these services to succeed in UFV’s academic setting.
“You can learn a language to a certain extent on your own, but … that kind of daily English is not the kind of English that you need in order to be able to study at a university or college level,” she says. “If you were to be living, let’s say in Spain for a year or so, do you think that after that year you would be able to start taking first-year university courses in Spanish?”
