EFL

The English as a Foreign Language (EFL) program, a comprehensive fully online program, is developed to teach students English for Academic Purposes (EAP). This enables them to benefit from English textbooks, academic journals, and web-based courses and prepares them for taking online university courses offered in English by the hundreds of Affiliated Global Faculty in North America, Europe, Australia and other regions. A unique feature of BIHE’s EFL program is its course content addressing issues such as world peace, environmental protection, and equality.

EFL’s pedagogically multimedia, and interactive computer-based courses have helped students, including many living in vastly remote towns and villages, to have access to high quality university courses at home, and at no cost. Using the Internet, experienced volunteer English teachers from 15 countries, places as diverse as Argentina, Peru, United States, Switzerland, Canada, Iceland, England, Bolivia, Japan, Guam, China, Russia, and Norway, have taught writing and reading, and hundreds of volunteers from around the globe have assisted students with conversation practices. Such a global, heartwarming, volunteering spirit, often leading to deep and long lasting teacher-student friendships, has been a valuable social capital for strengthening the morale of isolated, deprived and persecuted students, denied access to the social and academic settings of the existing well-established universities.

No other comprehensive, fully online EFL/EAP program was offered by any university in 2005, when the development of BIHE’s EFL courses was undertaken, and that may still be the case. By fall 2007, more than a thousand students had enrolled in EFL courses, supported by 180 volunteers. The courses have been accompanied by supporting systems like placement tests and exams, automated statistical tools for monitoring and analysis of students’ and teachers’ performance, regular Internet office hours for answering students’ questions, student surveys, program evaluation, and action-research for quality improvement. Since its inception, the program and its activities have been faithfully supported by a host of global volunteers, both Baháʼí and friends of the Faith.

In 2022, the EFL program goals are the same but the student numbers have decreased due to programming decisions and, therefore, the numbers of volunteers have decreased. Students that wholeheartedly embrace the online opportunity and faithfully complete their own assignments have had amazing success despite the difficult circumstances and have gone forward to completing advanced degrees using their success in English. The program remains a robust instrument for preparing students to learn academic English.