Teaching in the ELI is carried out primarily by graduate assistants and lecturers. The original program was available only to foreign graduate students, and native speakers of English were not eligible for admission. The ELI at that time was a recognized academic unit, but was neither a department nor a part of any department. Therefore, Dr. Sittler proposed the establishment of a new Department of English as a Second Language. The Department of English as a Second Language thus became the first such department established in the United States or, as far as we know, anywhere in the world.
Departmental status is still rare.
Over the years, the Department of SLS has evolved in many ways. Due to the untimely death of Richard Sittler just before the new department came into being, Theodore H. Plaister became the first Chair of the new department. The 1980s and 1990s saw a considerable turnover in the original ELI-based faculty, so that currently, the faculty are predominantly oriented toward graduate studies, professional training, and research. The MA program in ESL is widely recognized as the best such program in the United States and internationally, and the PhD program has rapidly surpassed its major competition in superiority.