CORE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
| LISTENING/ SPEAKING 1:This course aims to help learners participate in brief and routine conversations. They will discuss main ideas and details from simple conversations. They will understand, give and follow instructions to complete a task. Learners will also identify and apply pronunciation techniques to frequently used words. | LISTENING/ SPEAKING 2: This course prepares students for taking notes, outlining, summarizing and paraphrasing simple lectures, presentations, and dialogues. They will study high frequency idioms and colloquial expressions. Students will practice applying stress and intonation across sentences to make fluid conversations. | LISTENING/ SPEAKING 3: This class aims to help students guess meaning of analogies, less frequent idioms and colloquial expressions. Students will practice summarizing brief and lengthy lectures and distinguishing between major and minor details. Students will practice giving presentations using sequencing words and argumentation techniques. |
| READING 1: This class aims to help students increase their reading speed from single sentences to paragraphs. They will analyze use of connectors in reading texts. Very brief texts of different genre will be introduced in this course. Students will identify factual information, main ideas, and details through guided exercises and book reports. Students are expected to recognize 600 most frequently used words, 300 headwords, and 50 academic words. | READING 2: Students will use skimming and scanning techniques to outline texts, understand basic organizational plan, and distinguish between main ideas and details. This class will present different genre in short versions, such as history, science, literature. Students are expected to recognize 1,500 most frequently used words, 1200 headwords, and 270 academic words in context. | READING 3: This class will help students respond to cultural norms in edited versions of historical texts, literature, and everyday texts. Students will practice summarizing original texts and analyzing statistics and newspapers articles. They will identify purpose, main ideas and details in a range of organizational plans, i.e., cause and effect, chronological, persuasive. By the end of this class, students should identify almost all of frequently used words, 1700 headwords, and 460 academic words in context. |
| WRITING 1: Students are introduced to brainstorming techniques and formatting a basic paragraph. Students will learn how to write introductions, simple time-order, and descriptive paragraphs. Practice will focus on creating simple sentences, compound sentences, and complex sentences using some subordinators. By the end of this class, students are expected to self-edit and peer-edit papers for basic mechanical errors. Students may maintain writing journals. | WRITING 2: This class will introduce formatting a basic five-paragraph essay, including a thesis, body paragraphs, and conclusion, Students will practice writing essays of various organizational patterns: comparison and contrast, narrative, descriptive, and classification. Students will practice using a variety of connectors to make ideas flow smoothly from one to the next. Students may maintain writing journals. | WRITING 3: Students will be introduced to research techniques and applying researched information in writing. They will interpret statistical data and paraphrase original texts in their own essays to support personal opinions on topics. Students will write essays in organizational patterns presented in level 2 and learn persuasive and cause/effect patterns. Students are expected to identify and edit for noun, adjective, and adverbial clauses in writing. Students may be required to maintain portfolios. |
| Grammar 1:Students will begin to create simple sentences and combine ideas using common connectors. They will form and respond to simple questions using WH-words and DO verb. This class will help students distinguish between simple present, present progressive, simple past, and future time. Students will be introduced to count and non-count nouns and articles. | Grammar 2: This class will present modals of ability, possibility, permission, requests, advice, and prohibition. Students will distinguish between present perfect and present perfect progressive. They will practice the passive voice vs. active voice, make comparison statements, and use common intensifiers (so, very, too). Students are also expected to distinguish between gerunds and infinitives as subjects and objects. | Grammar 3: In this class, students will identify and use hypothetical conditional statements in past, present, and future. Students will express future and habitual actions in past time. They will practice referring to past using modal verbs + HAVE. This class helps students to practice using noun, adverb, and adjective clauses and to create their reduced forms. |
| LIVING LANGUAGE LABS: At the ELCI, English learning doesn’t only come from books! The Living Language Lab is a way to really use your English. Each week we take students into the surrounding environment to interact with native speakers. One week we may learn about farm vocabulary and then visit a dairy to speak with the owners and workers there. Another week it might be a factory that manufactures homes. We might learn about the history of an area and go sightseeing there. Or we may go shopping, just for fun! The LLL is a great way to put your language to use and have a great time! | SERVICE LEARNING: Most every month, students perform service in the community. Using the language in authentic contexts in the community is a great way to stretch their English. Students will engage in building and restoration projects, tutoring, presenting about their own culture, sorting, distributing, and cataloging materials, participating in food drives and much more. |
- Level 1 reflects beginning level; level 2 reflects intermediate; level 3 reflects upper intermediate/low advanced.
- Prerequisites for each class depend on either of the following: initial placement test, teacher/student recommendation, progress test that shows student has achieved at least 80% of the previous level’s learning outcomes, or any combination of these.
- Students who hold F1 visas must attend all core classes to maintain full time status. Students attending ELCI’s part-time intensive may only take up to 17 hours of classes a week as permitted by the Visa Waiver Program. For example, a part-time student may take Listening/Speaking, Reading, and Writing classes, which total 14 hours a week. She or he also may take TOEFL class for 3 more hours a week, totaling 17 hours. While many part-time students choose to take three morning classes, they may choose any combination as long as they do not exceed 17 hours weekly.
ELECTIVE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
| TOEFL PREPARATION : This course will help students understand and practice testing in the sections of the paper-based TOEFL test: listening, reading, and grammar. In this course, students will learn various test-taking strategies such as skimming and scanning, listening for main ideas, identifying erroneous grammatical forms, and other question types frequently presented in the TOEFL test. This course is recommended for those who are at least in all level 2 classes and have 430 TOEFL or 45 SLEP. | ONLINE UNIVERSITY CREDIT COURSES : Qualifying students can take teacher-guided online courses for credit. This is a way for students to get ahead and get some college credit while preparing their language skills. Available to students in upper levels only. |
| GED PREPARATION : This class helps students prepare for the General Education Development test. Students are given diagnostic pre-tests to find strengths and weaknesses. Focus is on weak areas. The teacher will guide students through studies in textbooks and a specialized GED tutorial program as well as classes. The GED test consists of five areas: Math, Science, Social Studies, Reading, and Writing. Students may test three times in each area per year. We use the diagnostic tests to make sure students are ready before testing. | ONLINE HIGH SCHOOL CREDIT COURSES: Many students preparing for high school courses need several months of Intensive courses to get their English ready for world of high school. We offer guided online courses for credit to ensure that they do not fall too far behind in credits. This helps them to stay on track for graduation from high school. Students must be of a high enough level to do the coursework, and have a reccomendation from our teachers to enroll. We generally encourage several students to enroll in the same class for the sake of economy. |