News from Viet Nam: English Language Education

The need it great!  Consider joining me as I expand upon the work I began in response to an invitation to visit Thai Nguyen University in northern Viet Nam during Easter 2011. On that weekend, twenty-one Ph.D. students in English Education and I drew upon Aristotle's rhetorical triangle to examine Pericles' Funeral Oration, the funeral orations of Brutus and Mark Antony from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and King's "I Have A Dream" speech. Although all of the students were English majors at universities throughout Vietnam as undergraduates, none of them has ever visited an English-speaking culture nor, to their knowledge, had any of their own college professors. Native speakers of English visit the university on occasion, but there is no sustained interaction. I would personally like to address this challenge with a limited, but regular, series of weekend seminars at Thai Nguyen University, but I would also like to encourage other gifted English teachers to consider ways they might help address the immense needs found there.

Amerika First: A Journey Unfolds

Though technically my trek began in Hong Kong (via Detroit), the doorway to the American phase of the adventure begins in Boston, out of Logan's LEEDS certified terminal no less. Adventure in part because I'm destined to wander south of the Mason-Dixon line, the soil from which I fled (thrice! prime evidence of a compulsive disorder?) and to which I always return with no small degree of apprehension, especially in the summer months. But it remains the site of what my esteemed colleague and dear friend Tom Collins dubs momma-dharma, and so off I go, needing to negotiate only ATL and RDU enroute (confirming once again the adage, " if hell is south, we'll get there by way of Atlanta").