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I grew up in Saint Sauveur de Montagut, a small town lost in the middle of deep mountains in the heart of Southern France. During summertime, my quiet community would trade its peaceful and picturesque appearance for a warm one, sharing with thousands of foreign tourists beautiful landscapes and wide varieties of intercultural events. My childhood enabled me to develop an intense interest in communicating with foreign cultures. My passion for languages and travel also stemmed from my childhood, and I started learning English, and later Spanish, Italian, Latin, Chinese, and Arabic. Thus, I know first-hand how frustrating learning a language can be… It is also then that I realized the instructor’s vital role as a facilitator in the process of acquiring another language.
Determined to become a language instructor, I grabbed a suitcase and came to the United States in 1999 to finish my Bachelor’s degree in English as an exchange student at the University of Texas at Austin. I took a year off afterwards, to teach French in a Montessori school for children. A couple of years later and still not ready to go back to France, I moved to sunny California and completed a Masters’ degree in Communication at SDSU. Throughout my studies and beyond, I was extremely lucky to not only be able to teach a variety of subjects at the college level, including ESL, French, Speech Communications, and Spanish, but also work at the International Student Center of SDSU and interact daily with hundreds of foreigners just like me, away from home.
Later, I felt the urge to keep on expanding and refining my knowledge by joining the PhD program in Applied Linguistics and TESL at UCLA, from which I will graduate in June 2009. Realizing the importance of teaching languages in my life, and especially teaching ESL, I also obtained the Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language certificate, and the Teaching Foreign and Heritage Languages certificate at UCLA.
Teaching is my life. I could not do anything else. At 7 years old, I remember gathering my dolls and teddy bears in rows, teaching them what I had learned in class that day, and keeping notes of their imagined grades and personalities as students. Today, I still envision the classroom as a theater, in which students should feel free to express their opinions in a comfortable and creative environment. My goal as teacher is to show students not only the importance of what we are learning in class but also to provoke eagerness and curiosity in them toward acquiring knowledge. The students who enroll in my classes every semester at Valley College are rich with experience, with much to share and much to learn, and I strive for a partnership with them through which we join our knowledge and deepen our understanding of the world around us.
