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For years, Taylor Swift fans have sung along with the artist’s mega-hit “I Knew You Were Trouble” as they nursed their own heartbreaks, speculating which one of her exes inspired the song.
But for two instructors at the University of Pittsburgh’s English Language Institute, there’s another reason why many people around the world should listen to her 2012 tune: To improve their English.
In the debut episode of their podcast “English as a Singing Language,” Ece Ulus and Heather McNaught dissected the lyrics to help students learning English as a second language better understand idioms such as “red flag” and “notch on your belt,” while teaching them about verb tenses.
The podcast has been heard by listeners in at least 38 countries since June. The instructors, who came up with the podcast idea while working with students in the English Language Institute’s Language Music Club, plan to continue writing scripts and delivering episodes on their own for students and teachers around the world.
While the podcast has a promising future, the future of Pitt’s English Language Institute itself — one of the nation’s oldest intensive English language programs — is in grave doubt.
On Wednesday, members of Pitt’s Faculty Assembly voiced universal concern over a December decision by Arts and Sciences Dean Kathleen Blee to close the institute, effective June 30.
They predicted harmful effects on programs across the university.
In her decision, Blee cited enrollment losses here and at similar English language programs nationally since 2016. Enrollments plummeted by 50% or more during the pandemic. Having fewer students has made it harder for the institute to sustain itself financially, she said.
But Assembly members said the decision flowed from a flawed process and could pose financial and legal issues for Pitt. The Assembly unanimously approved a resolution expressing support for ELI’s continuation and reconsideration of the initial decision.
“There wasn’t enough consultation,” said Robin Kear, who as University Senate president also heads the Faculty Assembly.
ELI’s advocates say closing an institute that has attracted 14,000 students from 130 countries since 1964 runs counter to Pitt’s evolution into an international campus. It has implications from the arts and sciences to engineering to law.
“The closure of the English Language Institute will not only decrease enrollment of foreign law students at Pitt, but with less of those law students becoming lawyers in their home countries, it will slowly but surely decrease our visibility and reputation where we have worked so hard to grow it,” stated a letter read into the meeting from Charles Kotuby Jr, executive director of the Center for International Legal Education at Pitt.
Alan Juffs, a linguistics professor who directed the institute from 1998 to 2020, described the decision to close as “short-sighted” and “rushed.”
Juffs said a decision made a decade ago to move the institute from the Cathedral of Learning to the Parkvale building on Forbes Avenue resulted in annual rent payments of about $320,000 and depleted its reserves. That left the institute with too little of a financial cushion when enrollment dropped, he said.
When asked if the institute would be closing without constraints imposed by the university, he replied, “Hell no. We would have had sufficient funds to survive even the covid downturn.”
Blee has not commented publicly since notifying the institute of the closure decision in a letter early last month. The letter did not specify the extent of the financial pressures, but English as a second language would continue to be taught by the linguistics department as part of its regular offerings.
Provost Ann Cudd, who is being asked by institute supporters to intervene, also has been unavailable to be interviewed.
The closure would result in the elimination of eight union faculty positions, all of whom are represented by the United Steelworkers. The union is now negotiating its first contract with Pitt. A staff position also would be affected.
In addition to attracting international students to Pittsburgh, the institute’s faculty and staff support curriculum development, teaching and language testing across campus. Spoken and written words of institute students themselves have fed research into how students with varied proficiency acquire language, said Linguistics Department Chair Scott Kiesling.
One example, he said, is the ELI Data Mining Group. Its members are collecting multiple years of institute data hoping to enhance efforts by others at Pitt and elsewhere to teach similar students.
The institute “is a laboratory for how people learn language and create theories and ideas about how to teach,” Kiesling said.
Creative language-teaching ideas have sprung up, such as the podcast conceived by Ulus and McNaught as they spent time with students outside class.
So far, the pair has produced nearly a dozen episodes, each focusing on a single work by artists from the Temptations to the Korean Pop sensation BTS.
Lyrics and sounds of songs help students practice pronunciation, learn new vocabulary and better understand grammatical structures, they said.
Not to mention it’s more fun, the instructors told the audience during their initial podcast.
Nationally, enrollment in intensive English programs stood at a little more that 133,000 in 2015, but by 2020 had fallen to about 37,000, according to survey data from the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report. It rebounded somewhat in fall 2021, to more than 39,000.
Enrollment at Pitt’s English Language Institute followed a similar trajectory, going from 150 students in 2016 to 40 students by 2020 before rebounding to 85 by last fall.
The trend since 2016 coincided with student aid reductions by countries sending students to the United States, tougher U.S. immigration rules and the covid-19 pandemic that made travel from parts of the world problematic.
Experts see signs of a resurgence but note that the market has shifted somewhat away from parts of Asia.
Saudi Arabia, for instance, was the third-largest sender of students to the United States in 2016, at more than 61,000 , but that number fell to about 18,000 by this fall, the Open Doors report said.
“We know that it’s a cyclical business,” Kiesling said.
Blee is stepping down as dean on June 30. Some have suggested that the decision of whether to close the institute should be left to her successor.
No matter what happens in June, McNaught and Ulus say they will continue to combine music and language acquisition.
“We have been creating content for the podcast as a hobby outside of our job duties at Pitt. Since the podcast is not part of the English Language Institute’s curriculum, we plan to continue producing episodes,” they said in a statement.
Nevertheless, Juffs said closing the institute and eliminating instructors doesn’t square with keeping Pitt a place where learners from overseas can thrive.
“They are letting go the very people they need to provide their international students with the support they need,” he said.
Bill Schackner is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Bill by email at bschackner@triblive.com or via Twitter .
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