Attn. Dr.

Bruce Perry
Search Committee Chair
401 McGuffey Hall
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056
USA

Dear Search Committee,

I am applying for the position of Assistant Professor of TESOL/Language Education. I am a

doctoral student at the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii at
Manoa (UHM), where I am completing my dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Christina
Higgins. I plan to complete all the work for my Ph.D. degree in Second Language Acquisition by
June 2010. I believe that my research interests and extensive experience in teacher training,
materials development, and English language teaching make me a very strong candidate for the
position.

I have had substantial experience in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) in
multiple contexts around the world. I have taught English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to
graduate and undergraduate students at Lancaster University (UK) and at the English Language
Institute (UHM). My EAP teaching experience encompasses courses on academic writing for
advanced and intermediate levels, academic listening and speaking skills, integrated courses with
a focus on all academic language skills, and academic presentation skills. I have also taught
preparation courses for Cambridge Advanced Level Certification to adults from Europe, Asia,
and South America at a college in London. The four skills of reading, writing, speaking, and
listening form the main components of this examination. Additionally, I have taught English as a
Foreign Language to in-service and pre-service teachers from South Korea. A special focus of
this course was on developing their English language skills. Furthermore, I have over twelve
years of school teaching experience at all grade levels wherein I have taught English as a Second
and a Foreign Language in India and the Sultanate of Oman. These wide ranging teaching
experiences together with my coursework at Lancaster and UHM have given me a well rounded
expertise in the field of language teaching and have prepared me to teach a range of courses for
your TESOL/Language Education program.

I have a significant amount of research experience related to ESL and the professional
development of K-6 teachers. From 2008-2009, I worked as a research assistant on an
Elementary Teachers Professional Development Program for Dr. Eva Ponte and Dr. Christina
Higgins, where I helped to guide 15 teachers who received training in ESL methods and
techniques as they implemented the ideas in their classrooms. Over the course of one year, I
carried out more than one hundred classroom observations and forty conferences with the
participating teachers in order to help the project team record and analyze how teachers
translated theories into teaching practice. Working on this project helped me acquire skills in
how to fruitfully engage in supportive and critical feedback with experienced teaching
professionals. This project also gave me first-hand knowledge of how content classes can be
effectively adapted to better suit the language needs of second language learners of English
within the increasingly multilingual context of American schools. This project was very

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meaningful to me since I was also able to form real-life connections between the theories I had
taught in my undergraduate courses and what I saw in these elementary classrooms. I was
recently able to use some of this expertise to co-deliver a workshop for elementary teachers
organized by the Hawaii Department of Education in which my team and I presented a
professional development workshop to 120 in-service K-6 teachers on how to make mainstream
content teaching more responsive to the needs of second language learners. I have been invited to
co-deliver a similar workshop in February 2010.

I also have experience in developing materials for English language teaching. In my current
work for Dr. Sandra McKay, I prepare and teach English language lessons which are videotaped
and will be distributed to English language teachers globally as examples of effective English
language teaching practices. This project is funded by the US State Department and aims to
provide teachers in Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America with materials. The goal of this
project is to introduce new teachers of English to methods, materials, and techniques that
promote second language learning while also teaching about American culture and traditions.

In addition to my English teaching experience, I have taught undergraduate courses for the
Department of Second Language Studies at UHM. These include (1) Second Language Teaching,
(2) Second Language Learning, and (3) Bilingual Education. A significant portion of my course
on Second Language Teaching consists of the theoretical underpinnings of TESOL. This course
also focuses on the most effective methods and materials to promote second language learning.
Theories of first and second language learning are dealt with in my course on Second Language
Learning. The course on Bilingual Education deals with theories on bilingualism, together with
research-based studies of pedagogical models that best promote bilingualism. Many of these
courses were writing intensive, which gave me considerable opportunity to successfully
implement project-based process writing. Teaching these courses has provided me with an
excellent foundation to create and teach graduate and undergraduate courses in second language
acquisition, applied linguistics and TESOL.

I have also taught a course on Teaching Techniques in a summer program to in-service and pre-
service elementary school teachers of English from South Korea and have been invited to teach it
again in Spring, 2010. The course objective was to introduce these teachers to effective English
language teaching and learning strategies for their Korean contexts.

My training at UHM has provided me with a deep understanding of issues in second language
acquisition, applied linguistics and TESOL. This training, together with my teaching experience,
has fed directly into my dissertation research wherein I engage in an analysis of the narratives of
women in north India as they recount stories related to their medium of education. Having long
reaped the benefits of being multilingual in Hindi, English, Punjabi and Urdu, my research goal
is to identify the various enactments of empowerment that my participants engage in as they talk
about the impact that their first and second/additional languages, Hindi and English respectively,
have had on their lives. My research adopts a critical perspective on the advantageous position
occupied by English in the post-colonial context of modern day India. I engage in an extensive
critique of how access to English in India is limited to the affluent classes, yet this language acts
as the gateway to higher education and economic mobility in the rapidly developing Indian
economy. I thus extend the work of critical applied linguistics into the previously under-

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researched context of the narrated lives of Indian women vis-à-vis their first and second
languages. I have presented findings from my dissertation research at conferences across the
USA, and currently, two of my papers are under review by leading journals. I plan to publish my
dissertation research as a series of articles in refereed journals. While I intend to continue my
work in the Indian context because it provides a rich, unexplored research environment, I would
like to extend my research to immigrant communities in the USA to see how access to English
impacts their lives, especially those of marginalized groups. I would also like to extend my
narrative work to university TESOL/EAP contexts. My interest is in collecting and analyzing a
rich and varied collection of autobiographical narratives related to second language learning. I
am currently collaborating with my research partners on the elementary school PD Project to co-
author papers for presentation and publication and plan to continue with this collaboration.

I have included my curriculum vitae, statement of teaching philosophy, two samples of research
work, and evidence of outstanding teaching: copies of student evaluations, the syllabus for my
course on Bilingual Education, two samples of my written research, my unofficial transcripts
from Lancaster and UHM, and reference contact details. I will be happy to furnish the syllabi of
the other courses I have taught. I can be reached at my e-mail address: sandhu@hawaii.edu or
cell phone number: (808) 780 6326 any time. I thank you for your consideration and look
forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Priti Sandhu