Past Courses
Teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language
Academic Writing
This course is designed to help international graduate students and post-docs improve their academic writing skills. Classroom activities involve helping students to become more aware of the somewhat more restricted genre of academic writing and how the writer goes about summarizing and evaluating existing research, making, supporting, and qualifying a claim, and drawing conclusions. Classroom activities are supplemented by extensive online writing exercises and a term-long project. Students are highly encourage to dovetail their project with current work in their own field of study. The web site for this class is resident on the university's restricted-access course management server. However, you may access some samples of the teaching materials on the right.
TSE Workshop
This was my primary teaching effort during my years at Northwestern University. The workshop series is roughly equivalent to about one half-term of study and is designed to help international graduate students at Northwestern who are preparing to take the TSE test of oral proficiency in order to serve as Teaching Assistants at the university. The workshop combines reflective discussion with simulated testing materials and instructor feedback to help students achieve their best score, but also to realize more broadly how to improve their oral communication skills. The web site for the workshop is resident on the university's restricted-access course management server. However, you may access some samples of the teaching materials on the right.
Linguistics
Language and Society
This is a course I taught for the NU Linguistics Department in Spring, 2003. The course was an overview in how language varies with respect to such social variables as region, social class, gender, age, and ethnic group. The course also examined how language is used to structure social relationships. The web site for this class is resident on the university's restricted-access course management server. However, you may access samples of the teaching materials on the right.