ESL Support Courses

This course offers the study and practice of the vowel and consonant sounds that are basic to North American pronunciation and speech style, and it emphasizes listening skills and auditory discrimination of these sounds. It also introduces the spelling patterns in relationship to the vowel and consonant sounds. This course is appropriate for students at the ESL 11A level or higher.

This course is designed to help ESL students communicate more effectively by learning the rhythm and intonation patterns of standard North American English. The course includes a brief review of all vowel sounds and specific consonants.

This speaking/listening course for non-native speakers of English examines the cross cultural differences that affect communication. It prepares students to understand and speak English more clearly and fluently in pairs, groups, class discussions, interviews, panels, and speeches. Conversation techniques, vocabulary acquisition, and reading, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills are employed.

This course helps non-native speakers of English to communicate effectively using the noun system (count, non-count, proper, common, singular, plural) and modifiers (possessives, determiners: this, that, these, those) and articles (a, an, the). The course also helps students use correct subject-verb agreement.

This course helps non-native speakers of English to communicate effectively using verb forms including: present, past, future, perfects, passives, conditionals, and modals.

This course helps students whose first language is not English to construct grammatically correct sentences using appropriate punctuation. Students will learn to combine sentence elements (clauses and phrases) to produce effective sentences.

This course is designed for intermediate students who want to improve their reading skills. Students will improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking skills by learning strategies such as previewing, skimming, scanning, and making inferences. They will learn how to identify main ideas and details and an author’s purpose and tone. They will analyze novels and reading passages from their texts.

This is the first half of an advanced ESL grammar course designed to increase students’ grammar and editing proficiency. Students will recognize and employ more sophisticated language necessary for the successful completion of ESL 19A, ESL 19B, and English 1.

This is the second half of an advanced ESL grammar course designed to increase students’ grammar and editing proficiency. Students will recognize and employ more sophisticated language necessary for the successful completion of ESL 19A, ESL 19B, and English 1.

This course is a high intermediate to advanced course designed for students seeking to improve their reading and study skills. It concentrates on helping students improve reading comprehension, reading rate and flexibility, study skills, and note taking.

This course is designed for students who wish to develop their techniques for understanding academic vocabulary and using English words idiomatically. It emphasizes context and usage of academic words from the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000) or a similar corpus. Students will learn to comprehend and use approximately 200 new words to improve their reading comprehension, speaking, and writing skills for academic success.