This paper gives practical suggestions for the ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher who must prepare adult foreign students for academic life in the United States. The paper is based on activities carried out at the English Language Institute of the University of Pittsburgh. It is divided into three sections, according to language skills: speaking, reading, and writing. For speaking, the basic grammar text used is Mary Bruder's "MMC: Developing Communicative Competence in English," which consists of dialogues and mechanical and communicative drills. The complementary texts are Kettering's "Developing Communicative Competence: Interaction Activities in English as a Second Language" and Paulston, Britton, Brunetti, and Hoover's "Developing Communicative Competence: Role Plays in English as a Second Language." Kettering's book contains three basic types of activities: social formulas and dialogues, community-oriented tasks, and problem-solving activities. "Role Plays" contains exercises where the student is assigned a fictitious role from which he has to improvise some kind of behavior toward the other characters in the exercise. Pronunciation is taught with a sound-symbol approach. The reading program is still in an experimental stage, but an integral part of it is teaching advanced grammatical patterns for decoding only. A set of materials for controlled composition is being developed for the teaching of writing. Several samples are provided. (CFM)