A Conversation with English Professor Julie Whitlow

Julie Whitlow, PhD is an English professor and the program coordinator for the Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

Your home department is English, but your background is in linguistics and you work closely with colleagues in the School of Education to coordinate the Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program. Could you talk about your teaching interests and the ways in which the disciplines of English, linguistics, and education intersect?

My Ph.D. is in Applied Linguistics and I have an M.Ed. in TESOL. Honestly, my career path followed an organic course. I was an English major as an undergrad but studied in France for a year which I think altered my path. My first teaching was in a high school in Morocco when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. I wasn’t gifted enough in actually learning a second language to be a French teacher, although the mystery of how language works became a fascination of mine. TESOL is a true interdisciplinary field which draws from linguistics, education, cultural studies, writing, second language acquisition, and a fair dose of psychology. Teachers of English to people who come to us from all corners of the world have to apply a lot of concepts and content from a variety of areas that all intersect in making language teaching relevant and useful to our learners. 

I understand that you recently received a grant from the Whiting Foundation to pursue research in China - congratulations! What kind of research did you conduct and how does it relate to the TESOL program at Salem State?

My Whiting Fellowship has two goals. First, I presented a paper at the International Gender and Language Association Conference in Hong Kong on the subject of the book that I co-authored with Professor Pat Ould of the Sociology Department titled, Same-Sex Marriage, Context, and Lesbian Identity: Wedded by Not Always a Wife. I teach a course in sociolinguistics which is an area of scholarship that I have always dabbled in. When Pat was also interested, we started this research after same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts, and published our book in 2015. After the conference, I traveled to Beijing, Xi’an, Nanjing, and Shanghai to visit university English programs in order to better understand how English is taught in China so that we can best meet the needs of our Chinese students in our graduate MAT program in TESOL here at Salem State. I visited some classes at the Renmin University in Beijing and spoke with professors at the Nanjing Normal University as well. I hope to be able to incorporate what I learned into approaches and expectations for our Chinese graduate students. We have four students in the CHEPD 1+2+1 program arriving this fall, and I will have a discussion with them before they start classes and I hope to gain further insights from them as well.

In 2014 you spent a semester in Nicaragua as a Fulbright scholar. What was you Fulbright for and how did your experience influence your teaching at Salem State?

In Nicaragua, I worked with several university English faculties and taught writing classes, and provided consultation and professional development on their writing program curricula. It was really eye-opening to see how hungry the students in Nicaragua were to learn English. As one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, it was also very rewarding to be able to give the faculty more confidence in writing and teaching writing. It made me realize how fearful we as humans are about writing. Writing exposes our language and all of its strengths and vulnerabilities into a written and permanent form. Speech evaporates but writing holds us accountable. When I teach both the first year writing courses for multilingual writers and the graduate courses in linguistics and TESOL, I try to harken back to the confidence that the Nicaraguan educators found when they realized that everything that they write doesn’t have to be perfect. We write for different purposes and different audiences, but the learning comes in the process. My work both in Morocco and Nicaragua always reminds me of how much education and exposure to ideas and opportunities unites us, and how appreciative students from developing countries are and how little they take for granted. I try to take my students and their needs very seriously, and to try to understand what motivates them in order to give them the confidence to excel in English. We all need to understand that a few grammatical errors do not take away from the incredible accomplishments of our multilingual students who are studying in a second or third language. Their ideas are what is important; the editing of grammar is the easy part. 

Is there a book that has made a particular difference in your life that you would recommend to others?

I grew up in New Orleans and am still trying to figure out my crazy hometown and how it has influenced me. I am aware of and intrigued by all of the flawed and wonderful people I grew up around and am fascinated by the comic and disturbing nature of Southern Gothic literature, and the mixed-up dialect of New Orleans. I would say that we can all learn from the perverse irony that underlies most aspects of the South. For sure, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers have influenced me, and the way I look at the people and world around me.