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The Princeton YWCA’s integrated English as a Second Language (ESL) Program is open to both women and men and is designed to present a well-rounded experience for all levels of language skills. Its mission is to empower its students to interact with confidence and enjoyment in the larger community. The program teaches language skills through class work and homework that integrate listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, the YWCA ESL/Literacy Program offers more than just classes. It serves a cross-cultural center, serving as a meeting place for students to interact with one another, as well as with community members.  In addition to language classes, our students may be offered the following services.

• Volunteers tutoring in conversational English.
• Award Ceremonies acknowledging achievements and benchmarks within student tracks of study.
• The International Day program, where students share their cultural heritage with one another in a comfortable, fun, and enriching atmosphere.
• Special classes taught by our own students, such as international cooking.
• Publication in our newsletter, Cultural Exchange, which provides a forum for our students to be heard in the community.
• Book Club, which offers students an opportunity to improve language skills as well as share their rich diversity
• Access to ESL/Literacy Computer labs, where families and students can drop in work on their computer skills.

The ESL/Literacy courses focus on people who have difficulty reading and writing in their native language and want to learn how to read, write, and speak well in English. Expected outcome: Students will gain confidence in talking with teachers, doctors, co-workers, and employers. Increased conversation and reading skills will make the students’ everyday life easier and improve their access to the resources of the community. Adults can focus on beginning literacy, pre-level 1, basic grammar, basic conversation, and computer literacy. Onsite childcare is available during classes.

The ESL Core courses range from levels 1-5. They focus on people who read and write well in their native language and want to transfer those skills to reading, writing, and speaking well in English.

Enrichment courses are also offered to give additional practice in specific skills such as beginning conversation, intermediate conversation, advanced conversation, advanced grammar/writing, preparation for TOEFL, citizenship, learning English through the news, movie class, business English, and pronunciation class.

Outreach lessons and private lessons are also available.

• The ESL Program would like to know more about adult students learning English as a second language with a learning disability. What are the best teaching methods for these students? Princeton students could do case studies, explore a particular learning disability, or review existing methods for teaching language to students with learning disabilities. The organization would greatly benefit from a list of teaching tips as well as an annotated bibliography. 
• Although many ESL students are literate in their native language, many are not. For these students, they must learn to read and write for the first time in a foreign language, and although they do learn to do so through the ESL program, their rate of learning and English literacy is much slower. How does growing up in a non-literate environment affect a person’s rate of learning in the future?
• The ESL program is interested in tracking the progress of some of its students. They would be interested to have Princeton students interview their students and document their stories to find out what led them to succeed in the program.
• The ESL Program directors observe that their female students tend to learn English faster than do their male students. Is there empirical data that supports this casual observation? If so, can the program be improved to better address men's learning styles? Are there aspects of the program that influence the female students’ learning better?