"I'm Andrew! During my high school years, I developed a keen interest in language learning which led me to formally study Modern Hebrew, American Sign Language, and Biblical Greek and Hebrew. I later earned a BA in Applied Linguistics Interdisciplinary from The Moody Bible Institute of Chicago and an MA in Linguistics from the University of North Dakota.

My areas of expertise can be grouped in terms of ESL (especially pronunciation), biblical languages, and linguistics.

Since 2013, I've had opportunities to teach ESL classes at every level from pre-school to adult and to tutor a similar range of students 1-on-1. Notably, in 2018 I was able to teach overseas as the conversational ESL teacher at Inner Mongolia Art School in Hohhot, China. I recently started Accent Light which is my own pronunciation tutoring business for second language speakers of English. In terms of pedagogy, I take a broadly Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach influenced by many of Cambridge University's ELT resources. For pronunciation, I rely largely on Teaching Pronunciation by Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) and on Teaching Pronunciation by Murphy (2020). My teaching often prioritizes stress, rhythm, and intonation, but vowels and consonants are still given regular attention.

In previous experience, I taught a year of Biblical Hebrew online (2020-2021) and I currently serve as a biblical language instructor for the Blue Ridge Institute for Theological Education teaching Greek and Hebrew. While a student at Moody, I also served as a peer tutor for Greek and Hebrew. Pedagogically, I recognize that some students prefer a grammar-translation approach while others prefer more communicative approaches. I can teach both languages with either approach depending on student preferences.

I am thoroughly equipped to tutor phonetics, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics, metaphor, field methods, and more. While at Moody, I served as a peer tutor for phonetics." less...