Southwest Services
for ESL Students

Your ESL Staff

Southwest has an ESL Coordinator on the Language & Literature faculty, as well as 2 full-time faculty trained in ESL and 3 adjuncts trained in ESL. Please reach out to us at ESL@southwest.tn.edu when you have questions or concerns.

We can

test your students to see if they need ESL classes
provide you with resources to help them.
provide them with resources
connect them with tutoring.
coach students

Our ESL program offers

3 levels of ESL instruction in 4 classes
ESL sections of ENGL 1010 & 1020, COMM 2025, and ACAD 1000

Campus Resources - International Club

The Southwest International Student club has met every other week for students to interact, practice English, and share their experiences.

This year, the College will launch a new series of virtual events for the International Students Club called First Fridays, which unsurprisingly meets on the first Friday of each month.

There, students will meet faculty, staff, and fellow Saluqis from abroad to share stories, ideas, and fun activities.

Campus Resources - Academic Support Center

The Academic Support Center is a great place for all students to get tutoring, coaching, mentoring, and supplemental instruction. It is even more important that ESL students seek out this help because what they often need is just some additional one-on-one time to fully understand course content and assignments.

Tutoring is available to all currently enrolled students at Southwest. There is no charge for this service. Currently, the ASC has locations at the Gill Center, Macon Cove Campus, Maxine A. Smith Center, Union Avenue Campus, and Whitehaven Center.

Campus Resources - Smarthinking

Be honest. How many times have you clicked right past this Smarthinking announcement? We all click past it on a daily basis as we access our courses.

If you go to any course in PAWS, this announcement will be at the bottom of the course page. It is for Smarthinking. SMARTHINKING is live, online, personalized learning assistance. It is available free of charge for many subjects and offers ESL help.

ESL students particularly benefit from the extra feedback that they get from Smarthinking tutors. In the ESL sections of our English composition courses, students are required to turn in drafts of their essays to Smarthinking before peer tutoring. This provides them with one more level of feedback before

How can a student use SMARTHINKING?

A student can use SMARTHINKING for:

Live, scheduled tutoring
Drop-in tutoring
Offline questions
Help brainstorming a paper
A review of a paper
Help with a math problem
Connecting with an e-structor and interacting with a live tutor
Receiving feedback on writing from a tutor. This usually occurs within 24 hours.
Receiving a reply to questions. A tutor will usually reply within 24 hours.

How do I get started with SMARTHINKING?

To use SMARTHINKING, you need to create or update your account. You must:

Log into PAWs
Click on "SMARTHINKING" on any course page.

Grammarly

Southwest offers students and faculty a premium subscription to Grammarly, an AI-powered grammar and spelling assistant that suggests spelling, grammar, and style changes in real-time. It also gives customized checks for different document types, a plagiarism filter, and a function to help expand vocabulary.

The app checks writing against its database of content and style errors then underlines critical spelling and grammatical mistakes in red; stylistic errors in yellow. Hovering the cursor over any mistake brings up a detailed explanation of the error and gives the option to correct.

The explanations are particularly important for ESL students who can learn about grammar issues and improve while they write. In ESL sections of our English Composition classes, students are required to turn in a Grammarly report with their rough drafts. This has helped many students get into the practice of using the app and improve their writing.

While no spell-check or grammar program is perfect, Grammarly is far more detailed than the built-in grammar checkers of Google Docs and Office 365.

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Southwest Services for ESL Students