The Experimental Project

Collection of Data
Having developed the Bridge Course, an experimental study was devised to evaluate the efficacy of both the materials and the procedures and methods suggested therein for developing the five language skills. This was most pertinent, for the whole structure was built on ad/hoc assumptions. Another pressing reason for inducing experimentation at the initial stage itself was to establish a precedence for other investigators to pursue research as scientifically as possible in a new area of research such as this. All aspects-theoretical, conceptual, operational and methodological-of the problem must be examined as possible. Thus, the need was felt to tryout the materials I controlled and experimental conditions before they were recommended to other agencies for further use.

Initial Contacts with Universities
Since the Bridge Course was developed with a view to helping bridging the gap or, put simply, to make up the deficiencies in language skills of college entrants, it was necessary to make contacts with the concerned authorities in the three Universities in the State for familiarizing them with the materials prepared and the efforts made by the Institute for their dissemination and diffusion. The Registrars of the Universities were requested to advise the Principals of colleges in their respective jurisdictions to co-operate with the Institute in trying out the prepared materials. Their reactions were quite warm and enthusiastic, as they immediately wrote to their colleges to extend all the help they could.

Subjects for the Pre-Test
It was necessary to gather certain basic information regarding the student population in P.U.C. classes of these colleges. Letters and performance were sent to all the Principals with a request to furnish factual information regarding the following: (1) Total number of students in the institution, (2) Number of students in different disciplines, i.e., Arts, Commerce and Science, (3) Sex, (4) Medium of instruction opted and (5) Number of students in each medium. A preliminary scrutiny revealed some imbalances in regard to the number of students opting for the mother-tongue medium. The colleges where the Kannada medium was not provided had to be dropped. As the number of institutions teaching through the Kannada medium was limited, a decision was taken to include some colleges in the Bijapur area where an option to write the answers in Kannada in the examinations was given to students, although teaching was done through the medium of English. Subjects for pre-testing at the final count comprised of 730 students of P.U.C. classes in thirteen colleges located in the cities of Bangalore, Bijapur, Dharwar and Mysore. The detailed and other relevant information regarding the sample is presented in Table 3.

TABLE 3
DETAILED INFORMATION PERTAINING TO EXPERIMENTAL
CONTROL AND TOTAL GROUPS OF SUBJECTS

Sl.No.	Name of theCollege	Medium of Instruction	Place	Experimental Group	ControlGroup	General	Total
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13	Banumiah’s College Maharani’s College J.S.S. College Yuvaraja’s College Maharani’s College Govt. Arts College Govt. Sc. College Teresian College S.B. Arts College A.S.P. College K.C.P. Sc. College Karnataka Arts College Karnataka Sc. College	Kannada Kannada Kannada Kannada Kannada Kannada Kannada English English English English English English	Mysore Mysore Mysore Mysore Bangalore Bangalore Bangalore Mysore Bijapur Bijapur Bijapur Dharwar Dharwar	17 37 … 6 … … … … 10 14 … … …	22 23 … 2 … … … … 11 26 … … …	63  85 9 39 79 32 41 68 20 8 28 49 41	102 145 9 47 79 32 41 68 41 48 28 49 41
				84*	84*	562	730

* Experimental and Control subjects were administered the same pre-test as post-test

Orientation Programmes
The pre-test consisted of 8 sub-test passages (see Table 2) and involved testing for more than 5½ hours spread over two days. Besides, the conduct of LC and LNC tests demanded special skill. As the Institute wanted to ensure high uniformity in administering these tests, it was decided to conduct a short one day programme to orient and train the college teachers in administering them. A selected group of college lecturers (see Appendix V) - one or two from each of the selected thirteen colleges - was invited to the Institute. After familiarizing them with the purpose of the Bridge Course and the pre-test in particular, they were given a few demonstrations to show how the language skill tests should be administered. A tentative draft time-table along with the detailed instructions for the administration of the pre-test was presented and discussed with them. On the basis of their suggestions, the modified version of the time-table was finalized (see Appendix VI). Since the conduct of the test required the presence of at least two lecturers and since some colleges were not able to depute two lecturers and since some colleges were not able to depute two lecturers together, the lecturer who attended the orientation programme was requested to provide the other lecturer(s) with necessary information pertaining to its administration. Within a fortnight following the orientation, the pre-test was administered to the entire group of students and the data were brought back to the Institute. It is important to mention that a follow-up questionnaire (see Appendix VII) was sent to the lecturers who had conducted the pre-test in order to assess the helpfulness of the Orientation Programme and the efficacy of the procedures of administering the pre-test. This was done with a view to improving the technique of administering the test.

A few days later, the second workshow of 3 day duration was organized to give the same group of lecturers orientation and intense training for conducting the Bridge Course, since it involved intricate and complex teaching procedures. The programme consisted of (1) Introductory lectures on the developed Bridge Course, the experimental plan for evaluating it and the detailed discussion on different procedures and techniques to the followed in teaching and evaluating passages of various skills (First day); (2) A thorough discussion on theoretical, experimental and practical aspects of the Bridge Course, followed by a number of lesson demonstrations by the staff of the C.I.I.L. and the R.C.E. These lessons were followed by critical discussions on every aspect of each lesson (second day); and (3) The final day was spent on reviewing the whole gamut of facts necessary for successfully conducting the Bridge Course, recapitulating major teaching tasks, clarifying lingering doubts and re-emphasizing the need for following strictly the directions and suggestions in detail given in it for everyday teaching.

Subjects for the Experimental Group
As can be easily conjectured from the large sample of the pre-test, the experiment was planned to be conducted on a substantial group of college entrants. When the above Orientation Programme was conducted, the lecturers showed great confidence that it would be possible to have sufficiently large groups of students in the Experimental Group. Their confidence was based on the interest shown by the students while taking the pre-test. However, the same lecturers wrote back expressing a great number of difficulties were administrative, academic and personal as well. A genuinely difficult problem arose on account of the students themselves, as they were reluctant to participate in the experiment. It was difficult to convince them that the Bridge Course was worth spending 96 hours of their time and that too during the Dasara vacation. On the other hand, the college administration and the staff were not prepared to introduce the scheme in the regular schedule of the college administration and the staff were not prepared to introduce the scheme in the regular schedule of the college, for that meant finding a block of time of either four or two hours a day for one or two months. This created a critical situation in which only two alternatives were left to the Institute, one, to drop the course altogether and to make an attempt to conduct it I the beginning of the next academic year on a large scale or, the other, to try it out on whatever large or small large scale or, the other, to make an attempt to conduct it in the beginning of the next academic year on a large scale or, the other, to try it out on whatever large or small samples the colleges were able to collect. Since the Institute had already invested a lot in terms of physical and human resources in developing the Course and planning the experiment and since the personnel were not quite sure of circumstances they might encounter the following year, a decision was taken to carry out the experiment anyway.

This decision narrowed down the original scope of the experiment. More than half of the colleges (about 60 percent or 8 out of 13) dropped out (see Table 3). Besides, in the remaining colleges the course had to be offered on a voluntary basis, resulting thereby in quite a depleted and biased sample of Experimental Group. As can be seen in Table 3, only eight-four subjects in total from 3 colleges in Mysore and 2 in Bijapur volunteered for going through the intensive training. At this juncture, it must be readily admitted, that these conditions put restrictions on concluding and interpreting results arrived from the analysis of data, although many results based on the analysis of the pre-test date are substantially valid since the number of that sample (730) is sufficiently large.

The Experiment
The three colleges in Mysore conducted the course during the Dasara Vacation, whereas the other two colleges in Bijapur carried it out after the vacation. The Mysore sample consisted of 60 volunteers and the Bijapur sample comprised of 24 volunteers. The duration of the course for the Mysore group was four hours every day for twenty-four days while the Bijapur lecturers spent two hours a day for forty-eight days to impart the intensive training to the students. Both the groups were administered the same pre-test as the post-test at the end of the Course along with the other 14 subjects in the Control Group who were selected randomly from among those who had taken the pre-test but did not volunteer for the training. Although the total of the Control Group tallied with that of the Experimental, the number in the two groups for each college was not equal since some of the randomly selected Control students did not turn up for the post-test.

Analysis :
The data on the pre-test of 730 and on post-test of 168 (84 Experimental and 84 Control subjects) were analysed systematically by developing a scheme of evaluation to ensure objectivity, uniformity and reliability between several assistants employed for scoring the sub-tests. The scheme of evaluation presented in Table 2 was tried out by the two research assistants and was found quite reliable. While the multiple choice questions in RC passages along with LC and LNC having specific answers posed no problem for scoring, the passages for GC and EP required a special key and a short practice on the part of the scorer. Since the data collected were quite extensive, i.e., eight passages for the five skill tests (the pretest) of 562 students and again the same skill tests (the post-test) of 168 students in the Experimental and the Control Groups, four under-graduate students were employed for scoring the pre-test papers. While all the pre-test and the post-test scripts of the Experimental and the Control Groups were very meticulously scored by the two research assistants, the scoring of the remaining pre-test papers was done by the other scorers under their supervision. A random check of scored papers was also done by them, in addition to the cross checking done by the scorers themselves. The percentage of agreement was found to be very high, ranging from 90 to 100 percent between them.

These raw scores were tabulated and later converted into percentages for use in statistical designs. The major hypothesis for testing the efficacy of the Bridge Course was tested by subjecting the data through two statistical designs, i.e., the Analysis of Covariance (Edwards, 1957; Walker and Lev, 1965) and the Chi Square test (Siegel, 1957). The validity and reliability r coefficients were computed by the Pearson Product Moment Correlation. The assumption regarding hierarchy among the five skills was tested through the Firdman's test of Analysis of Variance by Ranks (Walker and Lev, 1965). The sub-hypothesis pertaining to socio-economic factors such as parental income, education and occupation, and sex were tested through the Analysis of Variance tests (Rao, 1969). The derived values in relation to each hypothesis and their statistical and conceptual significance are presented and fully discussed in the following chapter.