My teaching and lecturing experience extends from 1976 (tertiary from 1978), in Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Indonesia, China and South Korea. Thirteen years of this involved LECTURING LINGUISTICS (part & full time). The remainder was TEACHING EFL/ESL, mostly to adults. From 2000 to 2007 I taught in South Korean universities. I taught at Chinese universities for two years from 1998 to 2000. Currently (2008) I have returned to China, in Zhengzhou, Henan Province. My resume gives details of the actual employers. A fairly definite TEACHING PHILOSOPHY has emerged from the sum of this experience.

SPECIFIC LANGUAGE TEACHING EXPERIENCE

1. LINGUISTICS

Linguistics is a very broad discipline. I have both studied and lectured a good slice of it at different times. As a doctoral student at the University of Newcastle, NSW, my thesis focus was on GENERATIVE SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS (i.e. the field which Noam Chomsky pioneered). As well as lecturing undergraduates part-time in these areas for a number of years, I did a great deal of teaching in SOCIOLINGUISTICS, and some graduate seminars on HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS. The Faculty of Education in that same university also asked me to lecture a special series on APPLIED LINGUISTICS for their teacher trainees.

Later, at Southern Cross University, NSW, where the students were largely teacher trainees, I continued teaching APPLIED LINGUISTICS and PSYCHOLINGUISTICS (especially CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION).

During the three years that I lectured linguistics at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, the client interest again was especially in APPLIED LINGUISTICS (notably language teaching methodology), and PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, but also PHONOLOGY. Here I also paid some attention to DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS since there is a continuing interest in the Pacific Islands in recording and analyzing area languages.

I formally withdrew from my first PhD candidature in 1988 ( I came to believe that the generative model was inadequate), but in the early 1990s took up a second PhD topic in COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS at the University of Melbourne (Victoria, Australia). This was put aside for a few years, but I am now working on it informally again. For employment purposes it can probably be compared to the American status of ABD (see a 2004 evaluation from Professor Nicholas Evans, my Melbourne doctoral supervisor).

During 2003-2004 I lectured graduate TESOL students in English Grammar and Second Language Acquisition at Pusan University of Foreign Studies, South Korea. These lectures are online at http://thormay.net/lxesl/tesol/index.htm .

In 2005  I decided to build on the many papers and articles I had written which touched on language education. The University of Newcastle, NSW has accepted my registration of a doctoral thesis topic (my third!) entitled "Language Tangle - Predicting and Facilitating Outcomes in Language Education". Some 110,000 words on this topic are now prepared, and I expect to submit it for examination shortly.

2. ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE, and ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

In 1976 as a newly trained SECONDARY TEACHER, I taught for a year at Tangaroa College in south Auckland, New Zealand. The students at this college were 75% Polynesian, both local Maoris and immigrants from all over the Pacific (especially, Cook Islanders, Samoans and Tongans). Their diversity was amazing, and their English language skills equally various. The challenge was to integrate them into a regular English language high school curriculum.

Back in Australia in 1977 I worked for a year in the ADULT MIGRANT EDUCATION SERVICE (AMES), Melbourne. The task there was to give SURVIVAL ENGLISH SKILLS to immigrants from many countries. The favoured methodology at that time was called SITUATIONAL ENGLISH, which combined a heavy dependence on learning syntactic structures (we had to work from set texts), with a classroom technique of creating concrete situations to give those structures a memorable context. My own technical aptitudes later led AMES to ask me to conduct ENGLISH IN THE WORKPLACE programs around Melbourne. My assignments ranged from the LANGUAGE OF SHIP NAVIGATION for deep sea fishermen, to programs for AIRCRAFT CONSTRUCTION TECHNICIANS, and even for PROCESS WORKERS in a food factory.

From 1978 I was doing graduate linguistic work at the University of Newcastle, NSW, but also volunteered to run a NEW SETTLER ENGLISH PROGRAM for Vietnamese 'boat people' refugees. The Vietnamese community in Newcastle came to depend on me a good deal. Later these (unpaid) classes were taken over by a local technical college, and they asked me to continue with students from a wide range of countries. By this time I was PRODUCING MOST OF MY OWN MATERIALS, including many dialogue scripts.

In 1983, and again in 1985, I accepted yearly contracts at the University of Technology, Lae, Papua New Guinea. The requirement here was ENGLISH FOR SPECIAL PURPOSES in a whole range of disciplines, ranging from SURVEYING to CIVIL, ELECTRICAL and MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, to BIOLOGY, to BUSINESS STUDIES. PNG has 800 languages, so out of the classroom these students rarely spoke English. They were best engaged by closely liaising with subject lecturers and their specialist course content.

As a lecturer in linguistics at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji, from 1987 to 1990 my students nearly all spoke English as a foreign language, but their speaking & listening skills were generally quite high. I always left a transcript of my lecture notes in the library for those who were unable to follow at speed. These students did need help in ACADEMIC WRITTEN ENGLISH. Since most wanted to be teachers, they were also receptive to my lectures on ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY. The Pacific Islands normally have very limited resources, so I placed a lot of emphasis on encouraging the LOCAL PRODUCTION OF MATERIALS. These Island societies are also quite group oriented, so it made sense to suggest GROUP BASED LANGUAGE ACTIVITIES such as CHORAL SINGING and CHANTS.

When I returned to Melbourne for doctoral research in late 1990, I continued to support myself by working part time for the ADULT MIGRANT EDUCATION SERVICE. By this time the fashions in teaching methodologies had changed. Courses based on LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS had come and gone (though I prepared some materials with this focus). The prevailing style was a very eclectic COMMUNICATIVE SYLLABUS. The philosophy was good, but the practice amongst many semi-trained and poor teachers was not always effective. Then a new State Government, driven by ideology, imported a COMPETENCY BASED CURRICULUM from overseas. Again, competency (what you can actually do with a language) is an important concept. The implementation of the rather mis-named Competency Curriculum created many problems of in both teacher practice and student outcomes. These informal programs were forced for political reasons to place a great emphasis on EVALUATION, but the mechanisms employed had little TEST VALIDITY. I wrote some serious critiques of the whole process (see my website).

I moved to the TECHNICAL & FURTHER EDUCATION (TAFE) colleges, and for several years developed and ran a specialist course called ENGLISH FOR MECHANICS. In 1998 my employer asked me to conduct a specialist LANGUAGE CONSULTANCY for a large mining company in Indonesia. The aim was to set up a TECHNICAL ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE program for Indonesian mechanics and technicians. My employer paid me a site license fee for my book, "English for Mechanics", which was used as a basis for the program.

By 1998 I had let my PhD research in cognitive linguistics lapse; (I had planned to resume this when various technical problems in computer programming had evolved to a solution, and continue to have a strong interest in the area). I decided to extend my life experience by working in China, even though the money there is very poor. Most of my work in two Chinese universities was with MA and PhD students. That is, they were bright people and enjoyed language content which contained substantial IDEAS, as well mere language practice. Some of the PROJECTS which I developed for these people may be seen on my website at http://thormay.net/lxesl/lastmessage/lastmessageindex.htm.

In September 2000 I was contacted and invited to teach by Sungsim College of Foreign Languages (since merged with Youngsan University), Busan, South Korea. The Sungsim/Youngsan students were very different from the Chinese experience. These young people had low scores on every index : academic ability, intelligence, motivation ... Their language skills after six to ten years of school English were minimal, and the teaching they had encountered had been (mostly still is) unimpressive. In other words, they were a significant professional challenge.

I gradually evolved a number of techniques to engage the Sungsim students. We did regular work on INTONATION as a fun thing; ( Korean is more or less syllable-timed, quite unlike stress-timed English). I found that although they would not innovate, they were happy to memorize. This was a starting point. I created engaging SCRIPTS & DIALOGUES to learn. I HAM-ACTED, and coaxed them to follow. I realized that sitting behind a desk was associated with failure for them, and made everyone STAND UP around the edges of the room. Then I would go from student to student, forming a PERSONAL BOND and challenging them to perform. This was a great success. The materials I used were almost all my own, and may be seen at http://thormay.net/lxesl/bones/default.html .

In September 2003 Dr Brian King and I founded the TESOL Unit at Pusan University of Foreign Languages. We worked hard to build a professional program designed to articulate into international Masters courses, and a number of American universities are cross-crediting the program. The content was Applied Linguistics and TESOL Methodology for Korean graduate teachers. My own part of this - English Grammar and Second Language Acquisition - may be viewed online, including a series of Grammar and SLA lectures in Powerpoint slides.

The PUFS TESOL program was academically and commercially successful. It ran through two cycles of my courses, and doubled the number of student intakes. Although this program ran under the auspices of Pusan University of Foreign Studies, unknown to the students, the Korean government or initially to the lecturers, the TESOL program while I worked there was a private venture by a businessman, S.C. Shin; (luckily, the lecturers' actual contracts were with PUFS). This non-transparent arrangement was somewhat problematic.

In August 2004 I moved to Chungju National University, South Korea where I taught English to freshmen engineering and technical students. The student profile at Chungju National University was rather similar to the student profile at my earlier location, Sungsim/Youngsan University. The materials and methods evolved at Youngsan proved suitable for Chungju students. I also experimented with bilingual materials as a way to get from the known to the unknown. This proved rather popular, especially an interpreting game between paired students as a prelude to full dialogue performance. Another very popular experiment was with mini-dictations at normal speech speed of sentences chosen for their intonation contours. Even low-level students enjoyed figuring out what was said, and their responses give much diagnostic feedback. Chungju itself is a rather attractive small city in a mountain lake area. The university administration and academic staff sadly had little interest in or knowledge of language teaching. Student exposure to native English speakers was often limited to 2 hours per week for 15 weeks of a degree program. At one point I was responsible for 600 students in this regime. In 2007 I decided that it was time again for some fresh challenge.

3. CURRENT POSITION

Since September 2007 I have been employed as a 'foreign expert' in English language by Holmes Colleges (Australia & China) in a joint venture with Zhengzhou Railway Vocational & Technical College, Zhengzhou, Henan, China. The program is preparatory English for nursing and logistics students who can later go on to complete their studies under the auspices of Holmes Colleges, Australia. For Australian visa entry these students have to achieve IELTS level 6 standard or better, so the program is oriented to IELTS requirements. Their motivation is extremely high, and the working atmosphere is very friendly. The professional commitment of the institutions in this joint venture is a clear improvement on the South Korean experience. The province of Henan has over 100 million people, and great differences in wealth. The capital, Zhengzhou has an urban population of about 4 million, and is surprisingly attractive with tree line streets, good shopping and a number of universities..

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