The Vocational ESL and English for Specific Purposes Program at Irvine Valley College

The Program of Practice

Irvine Valley College’s noncredit Adult ESL program was founded in 2016 and has grown rapidly, from 5 sections in Fall 2016 to 95 sections in Spring 2026. Fall 2025 data shows that we served about 2,400 individual learners with more than 4,200 enrollments.

Midway through the program’s 10-year history, faculty began to notice an issue. Students would reach the highest level, but then, 38.5% would repeat the advanced integrated skills class two or more times. Even more striking, 57.3% of advanced students who passed that advanced course would go back down to a lower level. It appeared that students did not have pathways out of the program to their next step.

The Response

Our response was to begin building pathways out of AESL to help students pursue their goals. In Fall 2021, Irvine Valley College offered its first vocational ESL class–English for Professional Communication–with the goal of strengthening students’ language and soft skills for career success. Over the next five years, program faculty engaged in rapid program development, and today, the program has 13 noncredit Vocational ESL and English for Specific Purposes (VESL/ESP) courses, three VESL certificates of competency, and one IET pharmacy technician program, in partnership with Coastline ROP, that employs the I-BEST team teaching model. An I-BEST medical assisting program is coming to IVC in Fall 2026. The VESL/ESP courses help students work towards their dreams–whether they hope to better support their kids through the P-12 system, find success in a career, or transition to credit or noncredit college programs.

In choosing what kind of curriculum to build, IVC faculty looked to their students and got to know their needs through annual surveys administered by full-time faculty or counselors during class time. Through surveys, they learned that the majority of their students had college degrees from their countries (84.7%) and were not currently working but aimed to work in the future (61.3%). The surveys also identified the particular careers students were most interested in–entrepreneurship, real estate, education, and healthcare–which guided the pathways AESL faculty would build in partnership with career education programs.

Today, our 13 VESL/ESP courses are:
-English for Job Success
-English for Career Search
-English for Professional Communication
-English for Child Development
-English for Instructional Assistants
-English for Law
-English for Medical Careers
-English for Real Estate
-English for Parents: Elementary School
-English for Parents: High School
-English for Health
-English for Using Computers
-English for Citizenship

Our 3 VESL CDCP Certificates of Competency are:
-English for Multilingual Parents/Educators
-English for Multilingual Professionals
-Career Paths for Multilingual Professionals

The Unique Features of the Program

In deciding on course content for the VESL/ESP courses, AESL relied on partnerships with career education faculty and the involvement of full- and part-time AESL faculty with subject matter expertise. Designing each course started with a needs assessment process that led to the creation of original OER textbooks mostly designed by part-time faculty and supported by CAEP funding and a California ZTC Acceleration II grant. As of Fall 2026, all 13 courses in the program will be zero textbook cost (ZTC) with OER textbooks publicly available on OER Commons and LibreTexts Commons, making all 3 VESL CDCP certificates ZTC pathways.

Irvine Valley College’s Workplace/Specific Purposes program empowers students with the content-driven English skills they seek to achieve their personal, academic, and career goals. Their learning is enriched by guest speakers from local P-12 schools, IVC career education programs, local healthcare professionals, and more. The experience is continued outside the classroom with events for all AESL students, like the annual “Discovering Career Paths” event, with speakers from 3 career education programs and the IVC Career Center, and “Stories of Success”--an alumni panel featuring AESL students who have transitioned into careers or education programs through pathways to law, healthcare, entrepreneurship, and real estate.

The Outcome

Although the noncredit VESL/ESP program at Irvine is only 5 years old, we already have had promising outcomes. To begin with, we have had more than 4,000 enrollments in our 13 VESL/ESP courses so far. In the 2024-2025 academic year, we had more than 100 VESL certificates awarded (39 for English for Multilingual Professionals, 39 for English for Parents/Educators, 24 for Career Paths for Multilingual Professionals). Additionally, our program has had at least 2,700 transitions to IVC credit courses or noncredit career education courses. IVC AESL has an 18.5% transition rate to credit, with 1,675 students transitioning to credit by Fall 2024 (we are awaiting data on the 2024-2026 cohort). From Fall 2021-Spring 2026, there have been 1,058 transitions to newly developed noncredit short-term vocational and workforce preparation courses at IVC. Lastly, we have had 185 students complete I-BEST healthcare training programs between Spring 2024-Spring 2026 through our partnership with Coastline ROP.

Momentum has grown beyond AESL as well. Although IVC has historically offered mostly credit and transfer-oriented programs, the success of AESL and the creation of the VESL/ESP program has inspired credit career education professors at IVC to develop noncredit curricula. Growing out of collaboration with AESL over the past five years, IVC now has noncredit short-term vocational and workforce preparation courses in business, computer information management, digital media arts, entrepreneurship, health sciences, and real estate. In the 2025-2026 academic year, AESL and Career Education faculty got together to form an IVC Noncredit Workgroup (soon to be Noncredit Committee) to formalize their collaborative efforts.

Each California community college serves a unique population of multilingual English learners with their own individual dreams for the future. The development of IVC’s VESL/ESP program over the last five years shows how needs assessment and local partnerships with career education programs and industry can lead to contextualized ESL pathways that are customized to students’ goals.