PHILADELPHIA Learning and speaking English is one thing, but learning and speaking English slang can be quite another. Ask any foreigner who has come to study at an American university.

That was why Bill Kelly organized his informal, non-credit "Slanguage" classes through the Christian Association at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kelly, a retired economist, started teaching the class in 1997 after teaching English to Russian immigrants at a church in the Philadelphia suburb of Collingswood, N.J.

Kelly uses comic strips, song lyrics and a list of common slang words and expressions to teach foreigners how Americans speak English at an informal, conversational level.

Kelly also videotapes newscasts to show to the class. This was, for example, how they learned that a weatherman saying, "in this neck of the woods," was just a folksy way of saying, "in this area."

The Slanguage class participants are mostly Penn foreign students and their spouses who figured out quickly that traditional textbook English and every-day English are often horses of a different color.

"When I watch TV, it's full of slang. If you don know slang, it's difficult to understand," said Qi Li, who came to Philadelphia and Penn from China last summer with her graduate-student husband.

Yu Hui Zeng, a doctoral student from China, has been attending the Slanguage classes for most of the five years that Kelly has taught them.

"In daily conversation, I can totally understand everything," Zeng said.

Once, Kelly took the students to a baseball game to teach them about common terms associated with the American game. Zeng found that helpful.

"Now when I hear someone say, he's coming out of left field, I know what it means," Zeng said.