More hours of classroom instruction, and more intense instruction, should
lead to better results, otherwise why bother? The real question is how much
improvement is required to justify the time and money expended by learners,
teachers and tax-payers.

1.2 million adults are enrolled in federally funded adult ESL classes in the
United States.  36% of these students attained a measurable  educational
level gain after a course of instruction.  In this survey of 6,599 adults,
60% showed improvement. Obviously being in a survey has a big impact on
improvement results!

Almost half (49%) of the ESL learners in the survey were at level 0 and 1 on
the SPL scale, i.e. "no ability whatsoever' or "functions minimally if at
all in English." Almost 20% were Low and High Beginner level learners (2 and
3 on the scale). Level 3 is described as "understands simple learned
phrases, spoken slowly with frequent repetitions". At the other end of the
scale 7% of the adults surveyed were Advanced or level 6 on the  scale,
described as " can satisfy most survival needs and limited social demands."
Even the advanced learners were still at a basic level.


>From the tables in the report,it appears that the biggest factor affecting

grade improvement was not hours of instruction but the level of the learner.
Beginner learners (level 2 and 3 on the scale) improved the most and were
the least affected by the amount of instruction. Of those Low and High
Beginners who had the least amount of instruction ( between 2 and 60 hours)
almost 75% still managed to improve, whereas this only went up to 84% for
those who had between 140 and up to 512 hours of instruction, i.e. probably
at least 3 times as many hours of classroom instruction . We are told in the
report that 78%, or almost 4 out of 5 of these Low and High Beginner
learners improved regardless of the number of hours of instruction.

The largest group, those with essentially no English skills(49%), as well as
the most advanced group (7%), showed the lowest level of improvement, but
seemed to benefit the greatest from instruction. The report does not explain
this nor the fact that the rate of improvement  sometimes declines with
increased instruction.(see tables)

Intensity of instruction does not have a great affect on results. The
largest group ( 57%) studied an average of 4.5 hours per week and 61% of
these learners showed measurable improvement on the scale. However 31% of
the survey group had less than 2.8 hours per week of instruction and yet
56%  still managed to improve. The intense group, roughly 12% of the
learners, studied more than 9.3 hours per week. Despite more than double the
hours of instruction, compared to the middle group, the percentage of
learners with measurable improvement only increased from 61% to 66%. Again
it was the Low and High Beginners who improved the most, with the least
impact from instructional intensity.

To me the conclusion is that class instruction obviously does help but not
as much as is often assumed. Instead, I suspect that what really matters is
what the learner does outside the classroom. As the report says, an adult
ESL learner has limited time to spend, "typically 4 and 8 hours per week".
Surely we should focus on finding ways to enable these learners to create
more time for learning. In other words we should find ways to make it easier
and more effective for them to learn outside the classroom, and to encourage
them to do so, instead of trying to justify bringing them to class.
Classroom time does not seem to have  a decisive impact on their
improvement.
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