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 »

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 »

by Jose Morales Here at the English Language Learner Services we love to help you with your English communication skills. Whether is written or spoken, we have a program or resource to help you as a student thrive in the English language, and succeed by applying it academically. When we think of language we think  Read more »

  BY-Shirley Yang “Ok, that’s it for today, thanks everyone. Have a good weekend.” After Dr.Wang says that, I take a deep breath and start packing with an excited mood. My friends are waiting for me and we will go to UREC to swim. After five days being bombarded with assignments, finally I can have  Read more »

by Jose Morales This past Monday I held the first English Conversation Club meeting of the year (by the way, If you’re reading this and want to improve your speaking skills I would highly recommend coming down and hanging out!) and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the bulk e-mail advertising my service worked!  Read more »