About Me

By the spring of 1998, I was able to graduate from University of Southern California from Rossier School of Education with a Master’s Degree in TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language). My qualification as a teacher of English is fortified with a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and Language from Sogang University. Along with my academic background, the cultural and linguistic experience I have acquired in various English speaking countries has led me to build aspirations to be a specialist in language acquisition and teaching. For the major part of my schooling years, I was fortunate enough to reside in Hong Kong, England, and the United States for twelve years due to my father’s career in a bank. I was often moving back and forth between countries on the average interval of three years, and I was inevitably situated to be bilingual, and native-like in English. It was in England, during elementary school, when I started to pick up my English. In the late 80’s, I graduated from an American high school as an Honor Student. Although the length of my attendance was cut short when I had to move back to Korea, I was also a student at Barnard College, Columbia University for a semester.

After graduating from Sogang, I had ambitions to make use of my language skills in a foreign bank, but I realized myself to have better interests for teaching English, which I had continued to do in college as a part-time job. My interests for teaching English led me to further studies in TESL at USC, incidentally where my husband was also pursuing for his degree. Currently, I am married with two children.

For Teaching English as a Second (Foreign) Language, some of my interests lie in teaching within the Communicative Approach, an approach that places a weaker emphasis on grammar and drilling. An example of the approach would be to use the Mass Media (e.g. The Internet, Movie reviews, Close-Captioned TV, and Cartoons), and reading of authentic texts (e.g. romance novels), instead of textbooks, as the key tools for language acquisition. Some of my other interests lie in the Reading Process and the Efficiency of Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) in EFL classrooms. The title of my Masters Theses was written for “The Role Language Textbooks: An Analysis of English Textbooks for Korean Students.” Above all, I am eager to implement the methods and material that I have learned throughout my profession and recent schooling.

Nowadays, I have taken interest in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), a rising field for language learning, and I hope to motivate students to write on internet to better share the skills and knowledge they have.   

Main