Welcome!

I’m a language person, and you are, too!

My whole life, I’ve been working to overcome my monolingual upbringing. I went to university hoping to parlay my slight grammar addiction into a degree in German. Along the way, I got hooked on linguistics and language teaching--and was lucky enough to pick up some Russian, too. After graduation, I spent a year on a Fulbright fellowship, teaching English at a university in northwestern Russia and eating way too many pies. I kept teaching while earning my master’s in Linguistics at Die Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. My thesis focused on how multilinguals express and process emotions in their different languages.

After finishing my program, I started teaching at a refugee resettlement agency in the United States. For the first time, my classes were diverse not only linguistically and culturally, but also in terms of education level. Some of my students were seeing the inside of a school for the first time, while others had taught in classrooms of their own.

I realized that much of what I thought I’d known about language learning was far from universal, which inspired me to enroll in a PhD program in Educational Studies at McGill University. My research focuses on the learning strategies of adults with limited formal education. I hope to help increase awareness of these learners’ abilities and needs, and to offer resources that leverage their strengths to learn the language they need to thrive.