Critical Language Scholarship Program
Applicants to the program must be U.S. citizens enrolled in a U.S. degree-granting program at the undergraduate or graduate level at the time of application. Undergraduate students must have completed at least one year of general college course-work by the start date of the program. Other requirements are that the applicants should be in acceptable mental and physical health for which persons granted the scholarship are usually required to submit a satisfactory Medical Information Form and Physician’s Statement. The minimum age is 18 by the beginning of the CLS Program in the particular year.
Literature Circles in EFL
The study was conducted on two groups of students at a private high school in Sofia, Bulgaria. The first group consisted of 34 (fourteen-year-old) teenagers in eight-grade and the second group included 33 (eighteen-year-old) young adults in twelfth-grade. The aforementioned high school is an English language profile school, where eight-grade is a preparatory year with 21 hours of English language instruction weekly, starting from elementary level up to the intermediate throughout the year. In the school, starting from the ninth-grade onwards, the language of instruction for math, physics, chemistry and biology is English as well. Twelfth-grade is the graduation year, when students study intensively to get ready for university entrance exams such as, State-Graduation-Exam, TOEFL, IELTS or SAT. Because of these reasons English language is the most crucial subject for those age groups. The school has a multicultural setting as there are many students from different nationalities and family backgrounds. The class sizes are rather small with an average of 15 students per class.