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Contact: Ingrid C. Holm, Acting Director/Senior Lecturer II, holm@acad.umass.edu  or Margaret Allard, Senior Lecturer, mmallard@educ.umass.edu

Office: 308 Bartlett Hall  Phone: (413) 545-4210
Lecturers Allard, Holm.

The English as a Second Language (ESL) Program has been redesigned with the support of the UMA Institute for Teaching Excellence to offer specialized English for Academic Purposes courses for credit.  Undergraduate and graduate students may enroll in the same courses. In support of University internationalization, the program mission is to help post-admissions domestic as well as international undergraduate and graduate non-native speakers master the formal conventions of academic English required for Gen Ed courses, undergraduate and graduate courses in the academic disciplines as well as graduate writing for doctoral dissertations, master's theses, and professional research publications. As defined by the standards of the American Council of Foreign Language Teaching and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, the goal is for students to attain an expert level of second-language fluency and accuracy in academic written and spoken English. The courses are of seven types: 1) Academic/Professional Writing, including Advanced Essay Composition and Graduate Research English Writing 2) Academic/Professional Oral Communication 3) Academic/Professional Grammar for Writing and Speaking 4) Academic/Professional Vocabulary 5) English for Specific Purposes, including English for Medical and Health Professionals 6) English Language and Teaching Skills for International Teaching Assistants and 7) a First-Year Seminar on Intercultural Communication. Informed by research on Second-Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, Second-Language Writing, Second-Language Speaking, Corpus Linguistics, Composition and Rhetoric, and Intercultural Studies, the courses are taught by highly-experienced second language writing and speaking specialists holding graduate degrees in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Currently enrolled full-time undergraduate, graduate, Five College, and International exchange students are eligible to register for courses offered during the fall and spring semesters. 

For more information about the program or its courses, call the ESL Program or contact one of the instructors via email.