I am an adult ESOL teacher and administrator, with particular interest in working with immigrant communities in the U.S. I have taught English to adults for over 10 years.  My last job in the U.S. was as the executive director of the St. Mark Community Education Program, a community-based non-profit in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston.  We provided ESOL classes and citizenship assistance to over 200 adults a year with a small staff and lots of dedicated volunteers.  In 2008, I am working as the English support coordinator for the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, a computer science graduate school in Germany. To find out about my work experiences, check out my CV.

In November, 2008, I am relocating to Seattle and am looking for work in the non-profit sector.

I am also interested in classroom-based research.  My dissertation, from Boston University was on beginning learners' vocabulary acquisition. I found that when beginning adult learners heard a word 10 times over the course of a content unit, they learned the meaning of the word even when it was not explicitly taught.  When learners also had the opportunities, particularly in group work, to use the words, they showed improvement in other areas of word knowledge such as grammatical frames, collocations and pronunciation.

I have presented work from my dissertation at  AILA 2008 and AILA 2005 and will be presenting at AAAL 2009 in Denver. I am currently writing up articles for publication.

I have a blog, mostly about my family and travels.  The central character is my daughter, Maeve.  My husband is Michael Ernst, a computer scientest researching and teaching software engineering at the University of Washington.

You can email me at scathATalumniDOTdukeDOTedu.