U.S. Prospective Employees

The INTERLINK programs are designed for carefully-screened, serious, and disciplined students. All full-time students receive a minimum of 23 hours of instruction per week. Core classes are taught in two blocks, lasting four hours per day; in addition, twice per week, students also work on special projects which last 90 minutes each.

Most students spend 3-5 additional hours per day studying and doing out-of-class assignments. They also participate in co-curricular activities such as concerts,lectures, and field trips to local places of interest. In-depth orientation to academic and social life in the U.S. is an important feature of the INTERLINK programs.

For INTERLINK, a curriculum is not a set of textbooks or materials, a sequence of grammar points, etc. It is instead ideas and guidance about teaching approach/methodology and desired ability/skills outcomes (“benchmarks”) that a teacher is responsible for helping students to achieve and demonstrate. Teachers are not responsible for “covering material”; they are responsible for helping students develop and demonstrate specified language abilities. In INTERLINK classes, to as great an extent as possible, materials are generated by the students themselves, with guidance from the teacher, to assure the relevancy of content and the active engagement of students in the learning process.

To ensure that students attain their language proficiency goals within the allotted duration of their enrollment, INTERLINK has a well-defined, six-level curriculum that is specifically designed for university-bound students. It emphasizes the communicative use of English, academic skills, and cultural orientation.

INTERLINK courses are taught by professionally trained teachers with Master’s or Doctorate degrees in Teaching English as a Second Language or subjects appropriate to their course assignments. Most of them have have studied other languages, traveled, lived and/or attended classes abroad and are very familiar with the challenges which face students in new cultural milieus.

We have intentionally chosen to be small so that individual attention can be given to each student. The maximum number of students in “core” courses is 12-15; the average class size is 8-9; and most centers have fewer than 65 students.

Upon arrival, all students are interviewed and tested in listening, speaking, reading and writing in order to determine their levels of proficiency. Each student is assigned to one of six levels. During the term, students are evaluated on the basis of their attendance, preparation, out-of-class assignments, and quiz results. Each student’s progress, as well as attendance record, is reported by instructors on a weekly basis. Immediate action is taken by the director if an instructor’s report indicates that a student needs help or counseling.

This depends on a student’s prior knowledge of English. A student’s duration of stay at INTERLINK may range from two to fifteen months.

The majority of INTERLINK students are undergraduate or graduate students preparing to attend colleges and universities in the U. S. A few are professionals who enroll in the program to improve their language proficiency for personal and professional reasons. Students come from all major geographic regions of the world, including Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

Students who successfully complete the INTERLINK program do not need TOEFL scores for our host universities and a number of additional universities.

Academically qualified students planning to study at INTERLINK may be admitted conditionally to a select group of universities. Upon meeting the conditions as specified in the university’s conditional admission letter, a student may be admitted as a regular student. Some universities require that students submit application forms, official transcripts from previous study, documentation on finances, and perhaps letters of recommendation while others only need to review official transcripts to decide on conditional admissibility of students. In all cases, one of the conditions will be to achieve a certain TOEFL score or complete the INTERLINK program successfully. Assistance in applying to universities is available free of charge to all INTERLINK students

We believe that the best resources are the students themselves and we discourage lockstep use of textbooks, decontextualized worksheets, and photocopied exercises from textbooks and workbooks. To the degree possible, we believe that many lessons can start from students’ own experience and knowledge, and from sufficient numbers of different examples from which students can form hypotheses and discover language functions and nexus. The teacher’s main task is to utilize their  creative ability to set up communicative situations (oral and written), elicit language from students, and devise (and eventually enable students to devise) activities based on what students produce or provide. Online resources are useful, and much of what we prepare initially will eventually be modified by you or in response to your creations or experiences, in conjunction with your department head, as we determine more specifically what generic skills students’ need for their future jobs. The Curriculum Description and Instructional Guidelines, as well as the Teacher’s Manual and resource books provide INTERLINK teachers with copious information and ideas. Online listening files and other, more general web-based materials are also in place, as is a system which will enable teachers to create and share ideas and activities involving and utilizing student experience and input.

The curriculum sets outcome objectives/benchmarks for students, in terms of “student demonstrates ability to ______”. The list of target outcomes for each level/group will serve as the starting point for determining how teachers or administrators will determine that a student has met all or certain ones of the objectives. A student’s collected output, over time, tells the story, so the teacher’s focus is on making sure that a student has many opportunities each week to produce language, and that there is a steady flow back from the teacher of individualized, constructive feedback that points the student toward the areas he needs to focus on and specific suggested actions to take to make progress toward the benchmark abilities. Teachers produce written progress reports in which they evaluate and comment on progress. Students take progress tests which provide a “point in time” measure, predicated on the same benchmarks used in portfolio assessment, and weighted toward productive skills. Grades are given, based on a clear formula for point distribution.

INTERLINK provides a comfortable and professional work space for all of its employees. In most cases it is shared.