Meet PLC's newest Board Member, and Clarendon Program Director, Linda Rountree.
After recently retiring in 2017 from her position as director of International Studies and MA TESOL at Concordia University, where she was on the faculty since 1989, Linda was not quite ready to put away her many years' worth of teaching skills and experience for good. At Concordia, Linda taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses including composition, ESOL, linguistics, grammar and syntax. So when an alum of the Concordia University MA TESOL program asked her to join the PLC Board
(see February 2020 Newsletter profile of PLC Board Member Delpha Thomas), Linda saw an opportunity to continue to be of service to the community she has called home since 1986.
Since joining the Board, in addition to running the Clarendon School program, she has taken on a number of projects for PLC. "
I have done a couple of PLC's 'Awesome Tutor' presentations as well as presenting at the PLC Tutor Conference in 2018 and 2019. Because of my interest and experience with teacher training, I have been most enthused about helping with the Tutor Training Workshops. The curriculum for the workshops was good but pretty old. So, I spent much of 2019 supervising the complete rewrite of the Tutor Training Manual as well as restructuring the Tutor Training Workshops."
B
orn and raised in Oklahoma, Linda has had a lifelong love for the English language that has literally taken her around the world. After high school
, she attended University of Oklahoma where she majored in English. Next, Linda took a job with the Peace Corps and moved to Thailand where she taught English at a teacher training college. It was a fascinating time to live and work in Thailand, as Linda describes it. Much of the country was still very rural and isolated from the rest of the world - just as the Vietnam War was beginning. Linda remembers visiting students' families in the rural countryside; she was the first white person villagers had ever seen.
Linda in one of her favorite places, Victoria, B.C.
After the Peace Corps, Linda returned to Oklahoma where she worked as a newspaper reporter in Oklahoma for the state's largest newspaper. During that time she also completed a masters in Adult Education, and taught ESL at the University of Tulsa. While there, she taught the wives of students from Saudi Arabia, who were studying for their masters and PhD in the petroleum engineering program. Most of the women were illiterate in their native language, one of her students was only 14. Linda recalls taking her students on field trips, teaching them about American culture as well as English skills. One of her students earned her GED in just a year and a half. When the students would have a success in class, they would throw a party and watch "Saturday Night Fever." It was a cultural exchange, for Linda as well.
Next, she moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma where she completed a masters in Applied Linguistics at Oklahoma State University
.
"I love grammar. I love the scientific studies of linguistics," Linda explains. "All languages can be reduced to a few small things: subject/verb, subject/object/verb. I'm a total 'linguistic nerd.' People think language is chaotic. But it's very logical, and there are historical reasons behind the words we use." Linda's linguistic studies gave her the opportunity to work in a variety of settings. She worked for a lab that was the first in creating the technology for voice detection that many computer systems use today. Later, Linda worked for Hewlett Packard and led a pronunciation class for PhD students from India working on accent reduction. Linda describes it like working on a movie set as a dialect coach. Linda's enthusiasm and passion for the study of linguistics provides the backdrop for a variety of fascinating topics of discussion and study.
The study of phonetics is the evaluation of
"predictable sounds," she explains. "You are always going to do it the same way. The definition of language is a set of arbitrary symbols which create a set of symbols for thinking, writing and communicating between groups. No matter what the sound or symbol is, as long as we agree, then we can use that set of symbols used in predictable ways. Language is actually very simple." When understood in this context, interesting questions arise. For example: "There is Indian English, Jamaican English. Who owns language?"
Linda at the Tip of Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina
With her years of teaching experience, Linda believes the most important skill a language tutor needs is "cultural sensitivity. Your students need to be understood. What they need depends on the group. The PhD student from India at Hewlett Packard has much different needs than the student who is trying to get better job and is studying to become an auto mechanic. It really depends on their goals, and their peer group. I had one group I used to teach who needed to fit in, in an American office setting, so I taught 'water cooler talk.' We learned things like: 'How about those Blazers?'"
The other two most important skills a tutor must possess are: "patience, and a basic knowledge of how languages are learned," Linda says. "Over the years as a teacher, I've learned more than I ever taught."
