PIESL offers free English language support for international students

PIESL staff member and ESL Support Lab specialist Tim Janda consults with a student during office hours.
PIESL staff member and ESL Support Lab specialist Tim Janda consults with a student during office hours.

Programs in English as a Second Language (PIESL) offers a free support lab for international and non-native speaker students who need occasional English language assistance related to their classes. The labs are held in Nebraska Hall and Hawks Hall (College of Business). Open various hours throughout the week, the lab is staffed by trained English as a Second Language (ESL) professionals who will consult with students on both a walk-in and appointment basis.

Consultants will help students understand homework assignments, assigned projects, and difficult reading passages from textbooks or other materials, brainstorm ideas for projects or formal essays, revise formal essays, incorporate and properly cite source material, and improve grammar and vocabulary. While consultants will not do the work for students, they will guide and help them to improve their assignments in a variety of ways.

For their part, students need to be as specific as possible about the help they need and come prepared to lab sessions with all relevant materials—textbooks, handouts, assignments and notes—related to their projects. Faculty, academic advisors, and anyone on campus who works with international students who are non-native speakers of English are encouraged to recommend the lab to students who might benefit from these services.

Regular hours for the lab in Hawks Hall room 14 are as follows (subject to change). Sessions denoted with an asterisk (*) are held in Nebraska Hall room 514C.

  • Monday: 10 AM – 12 PM; 5-7 PM
  • Tuesday: 10:30-11:30 AM; 2-5 PM*
  • Wednesday: 10 AM-12 PM
  • Thursday: 10:30-11:30 AM; 2-5 PM*; 6-8 PM
  • Friday: 10 AM-12 PM*; 2-4:30 PM*
For more information or to make an appointment at the lab, visit the ESL Support Lab website.