ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE AND SERVICE PROGRAMS

In addition to its MATESL program and its undergraduate minor, DEIL also teaches English to nonnative speakers through its service course program.

The ESL Placement Test (EPT) is given to new international students whose pre-arrival English test scores are below a campus-wide value, as described at this campus website (which applies to all applicants: graduate, undergraduate, and transfer, even though the actual website is at our Graduate College). Individual departments may set still higher standards, and when they do, these higher standards will determine who from those departments are required to take the EPT. Individual departments may not lower the standards shown at the campus website.

The EPT will usually be given during the week before registration each semester. It consists of two parts: a written test and an oral interview. The written test is a 50-minute lecture-and-reading-based essay which measures students' ability to comprehend spoken English and a reading passage. They will be asked to write an essay based on the information they have gathered from these two sources. The oral interview is administered individually and usually requires about 30 minutes. At the oral interview, students are given a topic on which to speak for three minutes. If students speak intelligibly, they will be exempted from further oral testing. Otherwise, students will be required to take another exam in which they will read sentences from material given to them.

Students will be placed into or exempted from ESL service courses based on the results of the test. The results of the EPT will be available by 1:00 P.M. on the next working day after both parts of the test have been completed. Precise instructions about getting test results will be given at the written exam, but typically, they are distributed in the first floor lobby of the Foreign Languages Building.

To see the schedule for the EPT and to sign up for the test, go to the registration site at the bottom of this page.

For further information, read the EPT bulletin, which describes the test in fuller detail and which gives advice on study and preparation. If you have any other questions, send an email to the EPT G.A.