SELS

Zuleica Acker

Zuleica Acker gained her first teaching credential in London in 1986. After teaching in Spain, Ecuador and Oxford, she came to San Francisco and became a teacher trainer for the Cambridge CELTA. Working for various language schools, she taught both teachers and ESL students for 12 years. In 2007, she gained a distinction in her TESOL Masters at Oxford Brookes. Most recently she has been enjoying teaching immigrants at Laney College in Oakland and City College of San Francisco. In her free time she is an oil painter and an arts/ language student.

Michelle Baptiste

Michelle Baptiste, an applied linguist, has been teaching writing at UC Berkeley College Writing Programs since 2002. She specializes in teaching culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse classes of developing writers. Her passion is supporting students to cultivate their own unique voice and develop a repertoire of voices they can access as they write across genres. She enjoys supporting students as they revise, design, and publish multimodal pieces online and encourages students to conduct interviews as part of their research process. In her own research to earn her MA in English...

Matthew Barclay

With a Master’s degree in English: TESL/TEFL from Central Washington University, Matthew Barclay brings a strong background in Linguistics to his teaching. Matt began his career as an ESL instructor at Mordovian State University in Saransk, Russia as a Peace Corps volunteer. Later, as a Soros Professional English Language Teacher, he trained language teachers at World Languages University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he also developed ESL textbooks. In the U.S., Matthew created ESL courses focuing on academic reading and writing at Diablo Valley, Los Medanos and Contra Costa...

Cathy Beck

Cathy is the Legal English coordinator and instructor for international LL.M. students at the IU Robert McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis, Indiana. She created the Legal English program in 2003 and has presented on various aspects of Legal English pedagogy at numerous conferences, most recently at the Liberal Arts International Conference 2017 in Doha, Qatar and at the Global Legal Skills XII Conference in Monterrey, Mexico. Cathy has received numerous teaching awards, including the 2017 Global Legal Skills Award for her support of global legal skills education.

Elizabeth Boner

Liz Boner earned her PhD at UC Berkeley in Education in the Language, Literacy, Society, and Culture program. Her sociolinguistic research explored social entrepreneurship programs and intercultural communication between American and Tanzanian Development practitioners in rural Tanzania. For the past fifteen years, she has been teaching ESL and sociolinguistic courses in Bay Area community colleges and university contexts and will be teaching at College of Marin in the Fall. She enjoys grappling with students on topics related to environmental, linguistic, and social...

Nicole Brun-Mercer

Nicole Brun-Mercer received her PhD in Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff. She has taught English in the United States, Switzerland, France, Russia, and Guinea. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, pedagogical grammar and vocabulary, reading, and composition.

Jennifer Burton

Jennifer Burton teaches classes in conflict resolution, new media, American culture, and the linguistic landscape. She has a master’s degree in linguistics from Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier, France. She has worked as a teacher, writer, editor, translator, and researcher on four continents and traveled to all seven. She developed and delivered an intensive ESL teacher-training course for low-level, non-native English teachers in Taiwan and Korea. Jennifer is trained in digital storytelling and conflict resolution and volunteers as a community mediator and conflict coach in...

Carolyn Carr

Carolyn Carr initially began teaching ESL in Mainland China and then Japan before relocating to the San Francisco Bay to work with an immigrant and refugee population at JVS and AnewAmerica, two non-profit organizations. She has maintained her interest and passion in the field of education working as a VSO volunteer, reader/editor, activist and educator. Carolyn holds an MA degree and has taught at tertiary level most recently at Stanford University, California and the University of Livingstonia, Malawi. Currently she enjoys coaching, training and coordinating eight...

Janet Christensen

Janet is an academic editor primarily for researchers in the social sciences, and an academic mentor at Newport Academy, a residential mental health facility for adolescents. After receiving her MA in TESOL from San Francisco State University, Janet taught ESL and English Composition at several Bay Area universities including University of San Francisco, ECIW at Mills College, and CSU East Bay, at San Domenico High School in San Anselmo, CA, and at language schools in Japan, Kazakhstan, and Brazil. She has been teaching in the UC Berkeley SELS program since 2009.

Michael Clark

Michael Clark has taught at UC Berkeley since 1991, for College Writing Programs and for the Language Proficiency Program in the Graduate Division. He has also taught university courses in Malaysia and Japan and was a volunteer teacher in the U.S. Peace Corps, serving in Central Africa. Michael lives in Berkeley with his family and occasionally writes travel guides about faraway places for Lonely Planet Publications.