The Speech and Language Program faculty utilize a diverse array of perspectives, knowledge, and expertise in order to enhance students' overall communication and language competence, including their spoken English usage. Our instructional endeavors are collaborative and incorporate current knowledge and best practices in assessment, teaching/learning processes, and use of technology. These endeavors promote student attainment of communication success in educational, social and work situations.

Our primary purpose is to optimize students' freedom of communication and language choice by offering instruction to enhance overall communication competency and self-perceptions of competence and control. We recognize that students make decisions about communication in educational, social and work situations and that they should therefore participate in multiple levels of decision-making including the identification of personal goals and expectations.

Our responsibility thus is to offer an array of experiences to address students' desires and needs and to operate with an adult-learner model that recognizes their role in such activities as establishing goals, setting priorities, selecting activities and assessing progress. While addressing a broad range of communication competencies, we have a unique role in serving the many students who want to use spoken communication, with or without signs, when engaged in face-to-face interactions.

In order to accomplish its mission, the program offers individual and group activities to:

enable assessment of students' speech, language, and communication competence

provide learning experiences in articulation, voice, pronunciation, vocabulary usage, spoken English grammar, discourse organization, conversational rules and strategies, public speaking, group discussion techniques, interpersonal and intercultural communication, and job interviewing

utilize state of the art technology for communication instruction including instrumentation for visual feedback regarding speech production

engage students in self and group analyses of job interviews, conversational interaction, and formal presentations

foster development of major-specific communication skills important for academic and career success

The faculty are certified by the American Speech-Language Hearing Association. The program is accredited by the Professional Services Board (PSB) of American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.