Students entering this class typically:

• have little or no English
• need a good deal of help in understanding class work in mainstream classes.

The course develops ESL students’:

• speaking and listening skills to an active conversational level,
• reading skills, especially following a story-line and understanding the main ideas in a non-fiction text
• writing in terms of grammatical accuracy, ease of expression, and complexity.

ESL1 course content

• structured, controlled listening activities involving the use of tapes, videos, short dictations and reading aloud by the teacher,
• oral work,  including pronunciation practice, discussion of written texts (various lengths and topics), reading aloud, retelling (e.g. based on tapes or videos), and short prepared speeches,
• reading "short" texts and structural readers, guided and free reading for pleasure, practice with scanning texts for information (note-taking and research skills),
• controlled writing especially at the beginning of the year with a gradual move towards freer expression; includes individual work in class and at home, collaborative writing, proofreading, and rewriting,
• some lessons each week are used to help students with their assignments in other subjects,
• some lessons each week are devoted to the teaching of humanities content which parallels that of the mainstream humanities class.

Students leaving the ESL1 course should be able to:

• express themselves orally in sentences, communicating basically what they want to say,
• understand almost all of what is said in mainstream classes,
• understand what is expected of them in assignments for mainstream classes, and possess a moderate independence in completing these
• read texts for mainstream classes and comprehend the essential points, being able to answer most questions, though sometimes perhaps still with difficulty,
• write complete sentences with accurate use of simple tenses, with some competence in dependent clauses.