Association News AEIS News Advocacy TESOL Affiliates

Welcome to TESOL's Adult Education Interest Section AEIS serves the interests of adult students in ESL programs, their teachers, and administrators. AEIS tries to bring together knowledge, precepts, and skills of two distinct but compatible areas: adult education and ESL. Teachers of LEP adults work in a variety of nontraditional educational settings. Programs are administered by city, state, province, country, and federal and privately funded programs. Organizational structures, standards, and goals follow widely different patterns. Those educators who have succeeded in their programs have developed unique professional strengths to meet some or all of the following challenges: multi-level and multi-lingual classes; irregular attendance of working adult students; continuous intake and exit of students; students with widely differing educational, social, cultural, economic backgrounds and ages; lack of materials, resources and equipment; low social status in the educational establishment; and an uninformed public. AEIS addresses itself to five major purposes: to develop an awareness of the needs and role of adult education among educators, legislators and the general public by sharing expertise, insights and experience; to address current priority topics through workshops, demonstrations, open fora, and discussion sessions at the annual convention and at other professional gatherings; to assume an advocacy role on any issue requested by the IS membership and deemed appropriate by the steering committee; to cooperate with other ISs to serve common needs of students and their families; to expand knowledge and understanding of adult education and ESL through research and inter-communication throughout the year.