Applied Linguist | Student Mentor | Education Abroad Enthusiast | Lecturer | Empathy Researcher | Social Advocate

Throughout my career in education, I have had the honor of working as a high school English and Spanish teacher, a private tutor and homeschool instructor for children with and without learning difficulties, an instructor of English in Korea, a professor of ESL at a community college, and a lecturer at a university. At the college level, I have taught courses in applied linguistics, translation/interpreting, linguistics, academic writing, TESL and ESL, which has exposed me to a vast range of students and coworkers with vastly different world views. I have learned the value of spending time with individual students with different experiences, perspectives, and learning styles. By connecting with students on a personal level, I have translated that mutual trust to co-create a more ideal and responsive learning space. Failure for me is when a student’s voice is lost, leaving the class without being understood. Rather, I strive for every student to derive meaningful skills and memorable experiences from my courses that will serve them long after the class ends.

Teaching is a sincere passion of mine, and the opportunity to connect with students is a central incentive to my career. Whether I am organizing a community service learning assignment for a translation course, reviewing the multimodality of social interaction in political debates for an Applied Linguistics course, or organizing a field trip to a courthouse to watch language interpreters in action, my foremost goal as an educator is to impart my passion through fun and creative forms of engagement using evidence-based methods. Passion from an instructor imparts sustained motivation to the class, which I believe positions students for the retention of long-term learning and critical thinking skills.

Research & Teaching Interests: Empathy, Translation/Interpreting, Humor, Language Acquisition, Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics, Intonation, Prosody, Language & Gender, Pronunciation, Curriculum Design, Cooperative Learning, Conversation and Discourse Analysis, Language Evolution, Experimental Linguistics, Writing Assessment.