This study discusses the goals and objectives of the Advanced Academy of Georgia at the State University of West Georgia, an innovative, full-time residential early-college-entrance program for gifted and talented high school juniors and seniors. Also included is a comprehensive report of its progress, as well as entering SAT scores, academic performance, retention rates, and scores on the Dimensions of Self-Concept, which was developed to measure noncognitive factors associated with self-esteem or self-concept in a school setting. In addition to these areas, noteworthy student accomplishments are discussed, including several anecdotal comments about student achievement from the university's faculty. The paper concludes with a discussion of the progress to date and recommendations for further studies on this program.

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English language learners from non-English speaking nations are confronting an increasingly challenging environment as they try to develop language skills to meet the competing demands of contemporary social media on one hand and those of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) on the other. Social media's explosion onto the global scene has created the need for non-English speakers to in effect learn two diverging contextual and communication patterns within what is supposed to be a common language. English, at least a form of English, dominates social media communications on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and a whole host of abbreviated format international social media platforms. Moreover, these platforms have developed communications mechanisms that do not even conform to normally accepted, conversational patterns of spoken or written English. The English of some social media platforms is informal, littered with special and unique abbreviations, grammarless, decidedly unstructured and abruptly short. The vocabulary is explicitly simple in most cases, consisting mostly of one and two syllable words. The introduction of the "emoji" graphics (now totaling over 2600 according to Unicode Standard, the emoji lexicographer) has added image elements to the phonetic root language vocabulary. The near total lack of punctuation, further

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