In addition to providing courses, Individual Language Coaching, and resources for Vanderbilt community members who use English as an additional language, the people of the English Language Center (ELC) actively contribute to our university, city, and professional communities.
We creatively collaborate and innovate to build pathways, connections, and knowledge for our students, community, and profession.
New Initiatives
International Medical Communication Skills Exchange with Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and Juntendo University, Tokyo, Japan
Collaborating with VUMC and professors from Juntendo University, the ELC has created an English for Medical Purposes program. Launching in March of 2025, this program is designed to enhance medical communication skills through innovative cross-cultural training. Bridging linguistic and cultural gaps in healthcare, the program will prepare medical and nursing students from Juntendo for effective global practice.
Using VR to Practice Small Talk Skills
With funding from a Vanderbilt University Sesquicentennial Grant, the ELC is piloting a resource that uses virtual reality for practicing small talk in a professional setting. See the story below for more details.
Stories
Professional Contributions
Recent English Language Center Staff Publications and Conference Presentations
2023
Sandra Bancroft-Billings. Building pathways to university services: Creating a glossary of wellbeing terms. Consortium on Graduate Communication (CGC) Summer Institute, College Park, MD (June, 2023).
Susan Barone with Lisa Russell-Pinson. The peril & the promise: Enacting EAP professional identity in Whitchurch’s Third Space. American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), Portland, OR (March 2023).
Stephanie Gollobin and Michelle Perdomo. Pooling pedagogical resources: Building digital libraries to facilitate practitioner collaboration. Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Convention & English Language Expo, Portland, OR (March, 2023).
Sandra Bancroft-Billings (invited panelist). Using linguistic data in ESP assessment and curriculum design; English for Specific Purposes and Applied Linguistics Intersection Panel Session. Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Convention & English Language Expo, Portland, OR (March, 2023).
Susan Barone with Lisa Russell-Pinson. Performance & wellness: Strengthening the graduate writer. Webinar, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia (February, 2023).
2022
Rongchao Tang with Naoko Witzel, Xiaomei Qiao, and Jia Chen. Is tone information available to L2 Chinese learners during L2 reading? Mental Lexicon 2022. Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada (October, 2022).
Carrie Cargile and Stephanie Gollobin. Beyond the pandemic: Building on lessons learned during remote instruction. Graduate Communication (CGC) Summer Institute, Virtual (June, 2022).
Carrie Cargile and Stephanie Gollobin. Teaching beyond COVID-19: Reimagining in-person instruction after remote teaching. Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Convention & English Language Expo, Virtual/Pittsburg, PA (March, 2022).
Carrie Cargile and Stephanie Gollobin. Using mentor texts in graduate and professional STEM writing. Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Convention & English Language Expo, Virtual/Pittsburg, PA (March, 2022).
2021
Susan Barone. Exploring and illuminating the leadership conceptualization process. Language for Specific Purposes Webinar Kevin Knight English for Specific Purposes Project Leader Profiles: The Leadership Communication of 55 ESP Project Leaders (March, 2021).
2020
Adam Steffanick and Susan M. Barone. A web application for developing pedagogical resources from a corpus. Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Computer-Assisted Language Learning-Interest Section (CALL-IS) Electronic Village Events TESOL Electronic Village Developers Showcase, Denver, CO (April, 2020 postponed due to Coronavirus).
Adam Steffanick and Susan M. Barone. Developing pedagogical resources using a local EAL student-writing corpus. Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Computer-Assisted Language Learning-Interest Section (CALL-IS) Electronic Village Events Technology Fairs, Denver, CO (April, 2020 postponed due to Coronavirus).
Summer Dickinson. (2020). Points of Departure: Rethinking Student Source Use and Writing Studies Research Methods, Technical Communication Quarterly 29(1), pp. 107–109. DOI: 10.1080/10572252.2019.1613335
Stephanie Gollobin. (2020). Writing and Identity: Promoting Critical Discourse Amidst Double Consciousness, Writing & Pedagogy 11(3), pp. 413–431. DOI: 10.1558/wap.35316
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