English for Professional Purposes

Overview of English Training for FBI Language Professionals

Joseph Pimentel and Kimberly Krulikowski

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FBI Language Professionals

• 95% native speakers of foreign language

• Test in both languages

• Accents impact perception

• English writing

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ACCENT REDUCTION

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Accent Reduction: Effective?

• Early stages• Resource intensive

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Accent Reduction: Set Up• Funded by ODNI

• Selected self-guided training software: Carnegie Speech

• Canvassed onboard language professionals

• Set minimum training time of 30 hours

• Purchased and distributed headsets

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Accent Reduction: Lessons Learned• Technical issues

– Network connection– Hardware– Add-on updates– Headset selection error

• Limited admin portal– Student progress in learning path?– Reports are too general

• Linguist commitment

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WRITING

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Writing: Effective?

• Great need to improve writing• Language professionals & supervisors

reported that the training was useful• Resource intensive

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Writing: Set Up

• Canvassed onboard language professionals

• Information requested

• Contract with local Berlitz schools

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Writing: Classes

• 1-3 students per class

• Location, language, area of improvement

• Total of 60 or 80 hrs (1 or 2x/wk)

• Homework given weekly

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Writing: Observations

• Berlitz struggled with high initial writing skills

• Quality depends on instructor more than school

• Constant communication required between student & school to meet training goals

• Several expressed need for translation training into English

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Articles Sentence structure

S-V agreement V Tenses Punctuation Prepositions Word choice Register Document structure

Perceived Improvement vs. Needs More Improvement

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4

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Perceived Rate of Improvement Across Genres

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Perceived Rate of Improvement Across Genres

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Conclusions

• Out-of-the-box ≠ admin-free

• Technical issues pose challenges

• Value in writing training

• Writing vs. translation skills

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