Briercrest College and Seminary’s TESOL program has signed an initial three-year partnership with the Colorado-based English Language Institute/China. ELIC is one of the world’s largest non-profit organizations involved in English language teaching, and it currently has more than five hundred Christian English language teachers serving in China, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, and Vietnam.

The discussion of partnership followed a visit by David Addington, ELIC’s vice-president of university programs and strategic initiatives, to the BCS campus in the fall of 2008. Impressed with the quality of our students and recognizing a program with a similar ethos for service through TESOL, David Addington proposed a partnership in which the Briercrest College and Seminary undergraduate program would become a preferred program partner alongside the graduate TESOL programs at Trinity Western University, Wheaton College, and Azusa Pacific University.

“ELIC’s huge reach across North America means the organization is very well-positioned to promote our TESOL program,” says David Catterick, who coordinates BCS’s TESOL program. “In all our partnerships, we look for compatibility of vision and the prospect of synergy. We are convinced that this partnership has exactly that, and we are excited about how this relationship will develop in the coming years.”