ABOUT ME

I was born and raised in West Virginia. I went to college at the University of Virginia, where I studied linguistics, and then to graduate school at the University of Chicago (linguistics) and the University of Miami (ancient studies and philosophy). I settled down in South Florida in the late 1990s. Afterwards, I studied translation at New York University and applied linguistics (TESOL) at Penn State. In 2021, I returned to the University of Virginia, where I earned my Education Specialist degree in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in English as a Second Language. I am a linguist and essayist. I love language, linguistics and writing about them.

I currently serve as the Chief Academic Officer at Language On, a private language institute with multiple instructional sites across Florida, Utah, and Massachusetts, along with a partner institution in Virginia. From 2008 to 2018, I worked with Educational Testing Service as an essay rater for the TOEFL iBT, SAT and Texas STAAR testing programs. From 2007 to 2016, I was Director of Programs and Professional Development at inlingua Florida. I am also a freelance translator and language consultant, certified by the American Translators Association (ATA) for translation from Spanish into English and one of the few active professional Latin-to-English translators in the world. Since 2021, I have worked with our field’s accrediting agency CEA (the Commission on English Language Program Accreditation) as a CEA specialized contractor, reviewing reports to support the agency’s work.

My academic and research interests include theoretical, applied and historical linguistics; phonetics and phonology; English dialectology (especially African-American English); Indo-European studies; neuroscience; anthropology; and the humanities. You can review my complete bibliography here, or see which of my works are currently available for purchase. To learn about my philosophy of teaching English as a second language, explore my views on selected aspects of applied linguistics or review samples of my work in the field, please visit my TESOL portfolio and blog.

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