What is your main ESL activity now? What are your principal projects, and what is on the back burner?

Hunter College has lost most of its ESL courses-Board of Trustees policy to do away with "remedial" courses in CUNY's four-year colleges. We still offer a few courses, mostly geared to passing an ACT writing test. So I teach these ESL courses and every year I teach a grad course in "Rhetoric and Composition" to prospective teachers in our MA program. Mostly, though, I teach freshman and upper level writing courses, which are not specifically ESL, but because Hunter is an urban public college, many of the students have ESL backgrounds-maybe 50% or more. Right now I'm involved in designing and teaching a "hybrid online" writing course using Blackboard. We have some class meetings, and some online projects. All the course materials are online and the Discussion Board is heavily used. It's a ton of work-much more than a regular course. But a new challenge is always good, especially after 30+ years in the classroom.

On the back burner are always all my writing projects-several Houghton Mifflin handbooks for writing courses in various editions and Cambridge U Press ESL writing and grammar books-all needing continual updating and revision.

How did you start your ESL career? Who influenced your decision? What were some important formative experiences in the early stages of your development?

I sort of slipped in sideways. I was teaching German at Cornell and then U. Mass in Amherst, and realized I enjoyed teaching language rather than literature. I had previously taught ESL in England (7 hours a day, 5 days a week-"Open your books at page 72" kind of approach) and saw the possibilities. So I gradually got more and more into ESL. Then I was teaching at the New School in New York City and was asked to supervise new language teachers and teach a teacher-training course. That was in 1967 and I've been in the teaching of ESL ever since. I got into writing when I went to Hunter College in 1971 and so began my two career loves: ESL and writing.

What are the four or five language/culture backgrounds with which you are most familiar as a teacher? Which ones are you familiar with from the perspective of a language learner yourself? What insights have you gained in how to meet the needs of English learners from these cultures and language backgrounds?

Lots of dead languages in my background: Latin, Anglo Saxon, Middle English, Old High German, Middle High German . . .! Over the years, I've studied the structures of various languages without ever learning how to speak them. A few years ago I took a Japanese course to put myself on the other side of the classroom as a language learner rather than teacher. It was salutary. I remember learning how to count: one, two, three etc. and feeling proud of my accomplishment. Then to my horror I found out that that was only one of many systems. Japanese uses different words for counting different objects: cylindrical, flat, and so on. I remember feeling a great sense of "Oh no! They can't do this to me," something akin to how our students feel about used to + simple form and get used to + -ing. "But why?" they wail-understandably.

If you had to give three pieces of advice to a new ESL teacher, what would they be?