Dear 256 Class Members:
Hi! I'm looking forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I will let you know about my own background in the field - I started studying linguistics during my freshman year at college, and I enjoyed the class, but it happened to occur during the semester in which I met my future husband. Being a bit distracted, I guess I didn't do all the required assignments, so I failed the class! I went on to another school which had a really good linguistics program, and I took a course in syntax there, as well as Chinese and Portuguese. I had already had 5 years of Spanish at that point. A year later I transferred to another college which also offered linguistics, and I ended up graduating with a BA in Linguistics, having spent my young energies on drawing trees of sentences and trying to understand Chomsky's transformational grammar rules. Actually the most interesting classes for me were the ones in anthropological linguistics and sociolinguistics. When I graduated, I was at a loss for a way to apply my knowledge. My advisor suggested I think about law school. This didn't make a lot of sense to me since what I wanted to do was study language, not law. I often wonder how different my life would have been if I'd taken his advice.
Three years after getting my BS I had figured out that waitressing was not a good career path for a Linguist, so I listened to a friend of mine who had gone to teach English in Japan. She suggested I go back for a Master's in Applied Linguistics, which would allow me to learn how to teach English as a Second Language. This made a lot more sense, so I enrolled in a MA program and finished the degree when my son was a year old (I tried superlearning to study for my comps while holding the baby - I recorded all the info I needed to learn and listened to it as I held him and took care of him and fell asleep out of exhaustion. Second language teaching methodology was pretty simple back then - REPETITION! my teacher commanded. This was seen as the 'magic bullet' for teaching a language. Horrors... luckily I didn't really buy it. I felt that students should be thinking while they were learning. Maybe even communicating, I dared to consider.
I started teaching ESL in Florida, where my students were from Venezuela, the Middle East, and various European countries at the university. I also taught at a refugee center where my students were from Vietnam and the Sudan. The director of my program for the MA had attended Georgetown, and highly recommended that her students continue and get a doctorate there. I wanted to get some experience teaching overseas - specifically in China. But when I talked to people who had returned from teaching there they described a pretty hard existence, with strict restrictions on movement and association with Chinese nationals. It didn't sound very appealing, and I had a new baby to consider.
I moved to the DC area in '83 and taught ESL in various community college programs, where the approach to teaching ESL was beginning to depart from the traditional methods and incorporating a more communicative focus. The jobs were only part-time, though, and very undependable. So when I had a chance to get a full time job at a law firm I took it, working as a paralegal for a patent law firm until I had my second child. I wanted to go back into teaching then, and found out about the JET program. I started studying Japanese and applied to go teach in Japan. I went in 89 and found the methodology rooted in the Chinese grammar translation approach. It was depressing - and it made me decide to come back and get a PhD so I could return and train teachers - single-handedly reforming the Japanese approach to teaching English, I hoped. (yes, I realize I was a bit of a dreamer...)
I came back to the US and started coursework at Georgetown. I was in the Applied Linguistic track there, but all the good profs had either just left or were leaving in my first year there. I gradually finished a doctorate there by doing coursework and going back to Japan to do research on which I would base my dissertation. I had gotten involved in learning strategies research, working with Dr. Anna Uhl Chamot (now a Professor in GWU's Secondary Education program), and was wondering how Japanese students used strategies to manage conversations in English. So to make a long story shorter, I ended up with three degrees in linguistics. Noam Chomsky doesn't recommend this - he says linguists should diversify and have more of a background in other fields. But I stuck it out because I love linguistics and I wasn't much good at any other subjects.
My interest in languages has taken me around the world; I have taught teachers in Sri Lanka and China, and worked in Saudi Arabia and Japan.
Now I have a job where I can use my knowledge of various languages in developing test passages and doing work with Native American Language Revitalization projects. I'm happy that I kept studying Linguistics. In this class, we'll focus on the parts of Linguistics that will inform your teaching. If it seems to stray from that focus, don't be afraid to speak up and ask me - how is this relevant?
Hi! I'm looking forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I will let you know about my own background in the field - I started studying linguistics during my freshman year at college, and I enjoyed the class, but it happened to occur during the semester in which I met my future husband. Being a bit distracted, I guess I didn't do all the required assignments, so I failed the class! I went on to another school which had a really good linguistics program, and I took a course in syntax there, as well as Chinese and Portuguese. I had already had 5 years of Spanish at that point. A year later I transferred to another college which also offered linguistics, and I ended up graduating with a BA in Linguistics, having spent my young energies on drawing trees of sentences and trying to understand Chomsky's transformational grammar rules. Actually the most interesting classes for me were the ones in anthropological linguistics and sociolinguistics. When I graduated, I was at a loss for a way to apply my knowledge. My advisor suggested I think about law school. This didn't make a lot of sense to me since what I wanted to do was study language, not law. I often wonder how different my life would have been if I'd taken his advice.
Three years after getting my BS I had figured out that waitressing was not a good career path for a Linguist, so I listened to a friend of mine who had gone to teach English in Japan. She suggested I go back for a Master's in Applied Linguistics, which would allow me to learn how to teach English as a Second Language. This made a lot more sense, so I enrolled in a MA program and finished the degree when my son was a year old (I tried superlearning to study for my comps while holding the baby - I recorded all the info I needed to learn and listened to it as I held him and took care of him and fell asleep out of exhaustion. Second language teaching methodology was pretty simple back then - REPETITION! my teacher commanded. This was seen as the 'magic bullet' for teaching a language. Horrors... luckily I didn't really buy it. I felt that students should be thinking while they were learning. Maybe even communicating, I dared to consider.
I started teaching ESL in Florida, where my students were from Venezuela, the Middle East, and various European countries at the university. I also taught at a refugee center where my students were from Vietnam and the Sudan. The director of my program for the MA had attended Georgetown, and highly recommended that her students continue and get a doctorate there. I wanted to get some experience teaching overseas - specifically in China. But when I talked to people who had returned from teaching there they described a pretty hard existence, with strict restrictions on movement and association with Chinese nationals. It didn't sound very appealing, and I had a new baby to consider.
I moved to the DC area in '83 and taught ESL in various community college programs, where the approach to teaching ESL was beginning to depart from the traditional methods and incorporating a more communicative focus. The jobs were only part-time, though, and very undependable. So when I had a chance to get a full time job at a law firm I took it, working as a paralegal for a patent law firm until I had my second child. I wanted to go back into teaching then, and found out about the JET program. I started studying Japanese and applied to go teach in Japan. I went in 89 and found the methodology rooted in the Chinese grammar translation approach. It was depressing - and it made me decide to come back and get a PhD so I could return and train teachers - single-handedly reforming the Japanese approach to teaching English, I hoped. (yes, I realize I was a bit of a dreamer...)
I came back to the US and started coursework at Georgetown. I was in the Applied Linguistic track there, but all the good profs had either just left or were leaving in my first year there. I gradually finished a doctorate there by doing coursework and going back to Japan to do research on which I would base my dissertation. I had gotten involved in learning strategies research, working with Dr. Anna Uhl Chamot (now a Professor in GWU's Secondary Education program), and was wondering how Japanese students used strategies to manage conversations in English. So to make a long story shorter, I ended up with three degrees in linguistics. Noam Chomsky doesn't recommend this - he says linguists should diversify and have more of a background in other fields. But I stuck it out because I love linguistics and I wasn't much good at any other subjects.
My interest in languages has taken me around the world; I have taught teachers in Sri Lanka and China, and worked in Saudi Arabia and Japan.
Now I have a job where I can use my knowledge of various languages in developing test passages and doing work with Native American Language Revitalization projects. I'm happy that I kept studying Linguistics. In this class, we'll focus on the parts of Linguistics that will inform your teaching. If it seems to stray from that focus, don't be afraid to speak up and ask me - how is this relevant?
