What's New?

2008
Spring & Summer
40th Anniversary
2008 Marks the 40th Anniversary of the Department!!

The Department Welcomes A New Faculty Member Beginning Fall 2008
Luca Onnis: Luca completed a PhD in Psychology in 2003 at the University of Warwick, UK, with a thesis on Statistical Language Learning. He is currently a Research Associate at Cornell, having obtained an R03 Grant from the National Institutes of Health to study fluency in monolingual and bilingual sentence processing.

About the Department of Second Language Studies at Hawaii

      The Department of Second Language Studies is probably the oldest independent department in its field. It was originally called the Department of English as a Second Language (ESL); however, in 2000, it was renamed the Department of Second Language Studies so as to reflect its broader focus. Its faculty and programs are held to be internationally outstanding. Its faculty are active in teaching, research, publication, and serve as members of many professionalorganizations and editorial boards.

      The Department offers a Master of Arts in Second Language Studies, a PhD program in Second Language Acquisition and an Advanced Graduate Certificate in Second Language Studies. A BA with an ESL specialization is available through the University's Interdisciplinary Studies Program.

      Although the Department originally focused on ESL, the interests of the students in the Department are no longer limited to the teaching of English. Many are researchers in second/foreign language acquisition generally; many are interested in critical and social issues of language learning and use; many are interested in language assessment and teaching; many have specialities in languages other than English.

      The Department's graduate programs are intended to provide advanced academic education for second language acquisition researchers, language teachers, and other language professionals. If you want to improve your English, these programs are not appropriate for your goals. You might instead look at one of the two language teaching units administered by the Department: HELP, for students who are not regularly enrolled in University programs, and The English Language Institute for students already admitted to the University.

Contacting the Department

If you intend to apply to Graduate Admissions and the Department of Second Language Studies for admission, please click on this link to see procedures and processes: Graduate Admissions Procedures

Department of Second Language Studies
University of Hawai'i
1890 East-West Rd.
Honolulu, HI 96822

phone: (808) 956-8610
fax (808) 956-2802

If you have questions, you can also e-mail Thom Hudson, Chair of the graduate programs: tdh@hawaii.edu