This is me.
I started this website to record my time living and working as an English teacher at Sino-American Denver Foreign Language School in Changchun, China. I worked in Changchun from 2006 to 2007, and came to love the city and Northeast China’s history. Changchun is, as a friend said, “a good place to live, but I wouldn’t want to vist.” The city is safe, accessible, and interesting, but not the sort of place one might go on a whistlestop tour of China.
After finishing my contract in Changchun, I studied Medical Spanish at the UAG in Guadalajara, Mexico and then returned to the States to finish my BA in Spanish (Honors) & Teaching English as a Second Language from Central Washington University. The research for my honours thesis concerned the use of popular literacy programs in Venezuela.
I was awarded the Saltire Scotland Scholarship by the British Council and the University of St Andrews to study at the University of St Andrews for an MLitt in English Language Teaching. The course of study included one semester in Beijing at Beijing Foreign Studies University’s Centre for Foreign Language Education. I won a distinction for my dissertation, which focused on textbook evaluation and adaptation for the Chinese EAP students.
I am now an EAP writing instructor at the Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Social Science (中国社会科学院研究生院), where I also teach Debate & Argumentation. I am especially interested in the analysis of critical thinking and argumentation through the use of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis.
More information about my professional life is available from my LinkedIn profile.
Colophon and Thanks
This site runs on WordPress blogging software. WordPress is free (but priceless! as people point out), open source blogging software that is easy to use, install, and customize. If you’re interested in blogging or doing any sort of online publishing, do yourself a favor and check them out. You can set up a totally free hosted WP blog at WordPress.com, or download the WordPress software and put it on your server. My experiences with WP and its user community have been positive, and I recommend it without hesitation or reservation.
I use the following WordPress plugins to add functionality to the site: