Mission Statement

Aligning with the overall mission of Oklahoma Christian University, the Language and Culture Institute (LCI) is transforming lives for Christian faith, leadership, and service. LCI provides high quality instruction in English as a second language (ESL) and orientation in U.S. culture to international students who are nonnative speakers of English. At LCI we provide quality English language instruction with care and respect for our students' cultural heritage in a comfortable, fun, and safe learning environment. We inspire learning and the achievement of excellence in all of our students, staff, and faculty though innovative and well-informed methods of instruction. Ultimately, LCI assists in the pursuit of our students' personal, academic, and professional goals.

Approach

LCI faculty and staff are highly-trained professionals. Many hold or are pursuing advanced degrees in linguistics, and all have lived or taught in a variety of countries outside the United States. Many have studied foreign languages themselves and, therefore, understand the difficulties faced by second-language learners in their classrooms.

While instructors at LCI may utilize a variety of different approaches to teaching, the communicative approach with both content-based and skills-based syllabi still dominates our philosophy. The communicative approach is based on the idea that people learn languages primarily because they want to communicate with others. As such, we seek to increase our students’ ability to produce English that is adequate for academic situations.