ESL Focused Skills Courses

• Intermediate ESL Conversation
• This course is designed for students who can act with some degree of fluency and spontaneity with native speakers. The course provides students with an opportunity to develop and strengthen speaking and listening skills needed in both formal and informal encounters.  Through interactive tasks, role-plays, and presentations, students will build up fluency, accuracy, and appropriateness in a range of communication situations. Eligibility for this class depends on scores from the speaking test.

• Advanced ESL Conversation
• This course is designed for students who can express themselves fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions. The course provides students with an opportunity to strengthen their fluency, accuracy, and appropriateness in both formal and informal encounters for different social and professional purposes.  Class activities include interactive tasks, role-plays, and presentations. Eligibility for this class depends on scores from the speaking test.

• Level 1: This course provides instruction and practice in upper-level, academic and non-academic writing skills and vocabulary as well as the grammatical structures commonly used at that level. The course focuses on aspects of grammar usage and avoidance of the most typical grammatical errors in sentence structure, punctuation, word choice, and style. 

• Level 2: This course is intended for English language learners who need to develop an understanding of English grammar at the college level. Through targeted grammar instruction, students will learn to recognize and distinguish a variety of sentence patterns in various genres, and to produce those patterns in their own written texts. The types of academic writing that the course may focus on include descriptive, narrative, cause-effect, comparison, and argument paragraphs and essays. Each genre is taught alongside vocabulary that is frequently used in those texts. In addition to reviewing and building upon students’ foundational knowledge of writing and grammatical structures, the course engages with important higher-level topics such as passive voice; conditionals; modals; and the use of adjective, adverb, and noun clauses. Students will write collaborative texts in order to apply these concepts to their writing in and outside of class.

Pronunciation: Sounds of English for Clear Speech

This course focuses on helping students develop their English pronunciation by looking at the sounds of the language. Students will break down words into their smallest parts while studying the sounds of the English language and learning how to tell them apart in context. The course will then go over the rules for word stress and emphasis. Students will work on improving their clarity and fluency when speaking in English, and get focused teacher feedback on their pronunciation. Great for students who have never taken a pronunciation class before! 

If one or more of the statements below is true about you, then this class should be a good fit!

• I have never taken an English pronunciation class before and want to really focus mostly on this aspect of my language now
• I want to sound more clear by pronouncing English consonants and vowel sounds accurately.
• I want to get better at knowing where to put the stress (emphasis) in words and producing that stress clearly.
• I want to be able to better hear the difference between words like bad and bed or think and sink

Pronunciation: Rhythm & Intonation for Effective Communication 

In this course, students will focus on the parts of English pronunciation beyond the sounds. The course works on building effective communication by studying stress, intonation, rhythm, and thought groups. Students will work on building their fluency and accuracy through extensive practice and self-analysis, along with teacher feedback. This course will not cover the sound system of English. See "Pronunciation: Sounds of English for Clear Speech" for more information about the sounds used in English. 

If one or more of the statements below is true about you, then this class should be a good fit!

• I have taken an English pronunciation course before, but I want to focus on pronunciation beyond individual sounds at the word level
• I want to better understand which words in a sentence to stress (emphasize) to make myself better understood. 
• I want to sound more natural by improving my intonation and rhythm patterns of English.
• I want to improve my ability to follow the fast pace of American speakers!

• Intermediate ESL Writing
• This course is designed for students who can write a text on subjects related to their interests. The course will focus on developing skills for writing in different genres for different audiences and purposes. By employing and analyzing various techniques throughout the writing process, students will practice writing focused, developed, and organized texts using the teacher and classmates as their readers. Eligibility for this class depends on scores from the written test.

• Advanced ESL Writing
• This course is designed for students who can write detailed texts on a wide range of topics and genres appropriate for different audiences and purposes. The course will focus on strengthening skills to express clear, well-structured, and grammatically correct texts for a wide variety of purposes. By employing and analyzing various techniques throughout the writing process, students will practice writing focused, fully developed, and well-organized texts using the teacher and classmates as their readers.

The TOEFL Preparation class is designed for students who want to prepare for or improve their scores on the iBT TOEFL test. The course focuses on skills and test-taking strategies for all sections of the test, including both the independent and the integrated tasks. Strategies include reading and listening for main ideas, facts, and inference as well as note-taking, planning, organizing, and delivering spoken and written responses. Students will also have the opportunity to do realistic computer-based practice tests in a computer lab to help them prepare for the test.