Four new courses for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) will be offered at Southern Arkansas University this fall. The courses include TESOL Methods & Materials, Second Language Acquisition, Second Language Assessment, and Teaching People from Other Cultures. These four courses are required of educators by the Arkansas Department of Education for an endorsement in TESOL. The first of these four courses, MCUL 4003/5003, Teaching People from Other Cultures, will be offered Tuesday evenings at 5:10 p.m. during the fall 2008 semester.
The offerings were approved this summer by the Arkansas Department of Education, according to Dr. Lynne Belcher, a professor of English at SAU who will be teaching the courses. Belcher, whose doctoral work was in the area of teaching English as a Second Language, said the courses are designed to help educate graduate and undergraduate students on the methods of teaching a new language as well as how to help students get through issues such as culture shock, which is common among people from other countries.
“I am happy to be able to use some of my experience and knowledge to help area students,” Belcher said. “This program will prepare educators to handle having non-native English speakers in their classes. Teaching English to those who don’t speak it as their first languages is very different from any other kind of teaching. The first thing teachers usually will encounter is culture shock, especially for young children who didn’t have any choice sometimes in leaving their home countries.”
Belcher said her first experience with teaching international students was in 1978 with Vietnamese refugees. Addressing the cultural differences is the first step in helping people become comfortable enough to begin learning another language, she said.
“When you work with internationals, you have to be able to see your culture through other eyes, Belcher said. “One can’t learn a second language if he or she rejects a culture.”
Besides showing teachers how to approach people from other cultures, the TESOL courses will also help teachers understand how students learn a second language and how it differs from learning a first language and how to assess what their students have learned in terms of reading and writing, speaking and listening. It also will provide a practicum of all teaching strategies involved in TESOL courses.
For more information about the courses, call the office of Liberal and Performing Arts at 870-235-4200. Interested students may also call Dr. Elizabeth Davis, 870-235-4212 (ehdavis@saumag.edu) or Dr. Lynne Belcher, 870-235-4213 (lrbelcher@saumag.edu ) or visit www.saumag.edu.
