In countries where English is a foreign language, universities are expected to enhance the communication skills of their students after overcoming the deficiencies that they typically carry over from their schooling years, and the challenge for universities is to achieve this through the few mandated courses. This paper describes an auto-enthnographic case study of a series of interventions for improving the English teaching outcomes over a decade by the dean of a private university of Karachi. Each intervention was ref ined over a number of semesters through several execution cycles consisting of design, implementation and evaluation. Interventions were tried and tested until the outcomes could no longer be improved with the given resources. Issues identif ied through the evaluation of a particular intervention led to the design of subsequent interventions. The interventions consisted of changes made to the number of courses, grading criteria, selection of learning methodology, assessment strategy, hiring qualif ications, teacher development, medium of instruction for technical courses, design of environmental culture, quality control across multiple sections, level of student engagement, intensity of instruction doze, lab and instruction credit hours, assistance from senior students, and out of the box designs of course interactions. Experiential learning and analysis of these interventions demonstrated that traditional classroom based interventions centered on a teacher do not work unless they are accompanied by immersion experiences in innovative, collaborative and flexible learning environments. Experiential Learning and Project Based Learning (PBL) techniques which can stimulate and inspire the students were found to be more effective. The study proposes an innovative structure for conducting English courses that would provide an immersion experience to students which would be concentrated in time and space to help overcome many of the identified issues
