What is ELLS? from Jose Morales on Vimeo.

By, Haley Cline I traveled on Saturday, April 13, 2013, to Virginia Tech to attend the Virginia Teachers of  English to Speakers of Other Languages (VATESOL) SouthWest Regional Conference. I was accompanying Kristen Shrewsbury, Shirley Yang, and Talat Altayyar, who would all be presenting at the conference. While I was not sure what to expect,  Read more »

By Altayyar, Talat Before I attend to James Madison University I was in an English school in Houston, TX, to improve my English and to be able to attend an American university. I stayed for 9 months learning English then I moved to Harrisonburg, VA, to start my bachelor degree in computer science at JMU.  Read more »

By Ahmad Abdul Ali My family came to US as refugees and I needed to learn English in order to integrate and succeed in the society. I learned the basics of the English language in community college and when I started JMU I still needed to improve it further. I started seeking resources that I  Read more »

By- Shirley Yang  Why you coming here every week to practice writing? How’s the experience writing with other peers as well as professionals?   At the beginning of my freshman year, I was worried about my writing class. My classmates are all American, the first language user. Every time when the professors asked us to  Read more »

  By-Shirley Yang  Even though I feel more confident than old me when just enrolled in JMU last semester, the confidence just fades away when communicating in academic forms. The first semester of sophomore year, I have started taking some fundamental business classes as my step stone to the major. Professors’ teaching style is kind  Read more »

Distance Makes the Heart Grown Fonder by Shirley Yang  

by Jose Morales I just watched one of the best TEDed videos I have seen so far. It is about spelling, but more so about the meaningful structures of language that we as speakers take for granted. Whether we’re learning a new language from scratch, or just speaking our native language we rarely think about  Read more »

by Jose Morales   I can’t believe it has been three years. Three years. That is one year short of a presidential term. Yes, it is hard to believe I have been working at the ELLS for so long, yet It all makes sense in retrospect. I have worked at the learning centers since sophomore  Read more »

Congratulations goes out to Jose Morales Mendizabal, ELLS’ Bilingual Student Liaison, for earning an Excellence in Tutoring award!  Jose’s service to ELLS spans 3 academic years, in which he earned Dean’s List academic status and dedicated over 460 hours to ELLS.  Jose’s contributions to ELLS include: ·         Participated in the Colonial Academic Alliance Student Affairs Professional  Read more »