SELS

Zue 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.

Christine Beckman

Christine (Christy) Beckman has an Ed.D in Educational Leadership from Northern Arizona University, an MA in Rhetoric and Communication from UC Davis, a BS in Communication from Northern Arizona University, and a certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) from UC Berkeley. Christy has been an instructor of Human Communication in Maibashi (Gunma prefecture) Japan, California, and Arizona. Christy teaches Business and Social Entrepreneurship and Storytelling. Recently she finished a 9 month grant with MIT OpenCourseWare and Maricopa Community Colleges (Arizona). She...

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...

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...

Talley Caruso

Talley Caruso, MA TESOL, teaches Business English with the SELS program at UC Berkeley. She engages her multilingual students through projects and interactions informed by real-world experience. Previously, she led global initiatives at Fortune 500 companies including The North Face, Vans, and Neutrogena. Talley is an active leader in CATESOL, a professional teachers' organization in California, where she received the Sadae Iwataki Award in 2023 for her...

Janet Christensen

Janet has been teaching in the UC Berkeley SELS program since 2009. During the school year she's an ESL teacher at College of Marin, an English teacher at Mt. Tamalpais College, which serves the residents of San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, a college admissions counselor for high school students, a writing coach, and an academic editor primarily for researchers in the social sciences. After receiving her MA in TESOL and a master's certificate in composition from San Francisco State University, Janet taught English at language schools in Japan, Kazakhstan, and Brazil, as well as ESL and...