Speaking the World's Language by Ryan

Speaking the World's Language by Ryan - July 2014 Scholarship Essay

Some professors teach you practical skills like how to calculate the area under a curve or the way the nervous system works. Other professors teach you completely abstract ideas like the meaning of justice or the definition of quality literature. Professor Ravi Sheorey taught me about how to teach language, which for me was a strange hybrid of these two approaches.

Professor Sheorey knew hew as about to retire, but he took a final class of graduate students into his Methodologies of Language Learning class because he knew he had something to teach. As a professor, he had founded the Oklahoma State University chapter of TESOL (the national organization for ESL learning), and he had returned home to his native home of India to study the way language was being taught and advised the government on better ways English could be approached.

As such a senior lecturer, his style of teaching heavily influenced my own approach to the classroom. He taught methodologies through a series of stories about his life, and he focused on the people behind the language. For him, the linguistic nuances of a language were found in the people who spoke it, and he urged us all to focus on the people who learned the language instead of the language itself.

I was new to the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) field, and Dr. Sheorey made me feel welcome. He suggested additional readings for me when I asked questions and always knew the difference between when to praise and criticize. When I visited his office hours, he welcomed me warmly and encouraged me to work hard and early, which became a motto for me as I developed into a language teacher.

When I told Professor Sheorey that I wanted to get a focus in my PhD in TESOL, he never questioned my choice, and he never waited for me to ask if I wanted him to be my adviser. He offered, which is an unusual act for a professor. He coached me through my first TESOL paper, and added round after round of commentary. Each time I brought him my paper, his pen circled in the air as read and then with a smile, he told me to try again. Each time I brought him my work, he offered more advice. In those office sessions, I learned what it took and what it meant to be an academic. It meant not giving up after producing an imperfect paper. It meant accepting that change happens slowly over time and academic writing is a process. These lessons still live inside of me today.

This last winter, Dr. Sheorey died due to complications in surgery, but as I move ahead in my career, I will remember the people behind the language that I teach. When I was teaching English in Korea, I helped a young woman pass the teacher's exam, an amazingly difficult exam for teacher certification. She kept coming back with her work each week and slowly improved, and the patience I felt while looking over her papers came straight from Dr. Sheorey.