The ESL program at Rutgers, New Brunswick, offers credit bearing graduate courses to non-native speakers of English in order to help students improve their oral skills and proficiency in reading and writing. 

ESL International Teaching Assistants (ITA) PROGRAM

Communication skills are paramount for International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) and, hence, a major concern.  Thus, increased emphasis on spoken English incorporating classroom examples is at the core of the pedagogy that drives the ESL ITA curriculum.  In these classes every opportunity is utilized to allow ITAs to learn and practice composite communicative language skills.  In order to ensure that the ITAs’ communication becomes effective and the response is appropriate to the audience and the situation, there needs to be a variety of settings that allow for communication between the speaker and hearer.  The ITAs themselves become an integral component and instructors provide much one-on-one training to assist individual ITAs to make progress in speaking English.  Another important element is the ITAs’ ability to understand spoken language as skilled communicators have fewer misunderstandings and make fewer mistakes.  Lastly, ITA instruction includes the social dimension of communication relating to the speaker and hearer in terms of attitudes, gestures, and behaviors.