About Me

My name is Richard E. McDorman. I was born and raised in rural West Virginia. I went to college in Virginia, and later to graduate school in Chicago and Miami, where I settled down in the late 1990s. During my career, I have embraced continuing and professional education, first completing the Professional Certificate in Translation program at New York University and then the Graduate Certificate in TESOL program at Penn State.

I am an educator, linguist, translator and writer. I love language, linguistics, and reading and writing about them. My academic and research interests include applied and historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, English dialectology (especially African-American English), Indo-European studies, neuroscience, anthropology, and the humanities (among others).

You can learn more about me by clicking on the following links:

To contact me, please send an e-mail to [email protected] or visit my website at www.richardmcdorman.org.

A Few Thoughts on Task-Based Instruction
I appreciate Belgar and Hunt’s (2002) attempts to integrate a task-based syllabus into the English as a Foreign Language curriculum of the Japanese university where they worked. No doubt, as the researchers pointed out, the students involved benefited from this… Read more: A Few Thoughts on Task-Based Instruction
Focus on Grammar
Although the field of language education has seen many advances during the last two decades, especially when it comes to acknowledging the roles social interaction and cultural identity play in the language teaching and learning process, I fear the same… Read more: Focus on Grammar
Learning to Teach
Left: Richard preparing a “lesson” for great aunt Evelyn (October, 1980: Beckley, West Virginia) Right: Richard and sister Crissy working on a “test” using Aunt Evelyn’s manual typewriter (December, 1983: Beckley, West Virginia) Below: Betty McDorman (image from 1978 Coal… Read more: Learning to Teach
Focus on Pronunciation and Fluency
When I studied phonetics and phonology for the first time in the early 1990s, the academic focus was almost entirely on the segmental aspects of the language’s sound system. We reviewed the articulatory and acoustic traits of each consonant and… Read more: Focus on Pronunciation and Fluency
The Dilemmas of Language Assessment
I would like to share my experiences with language assessment in my current instructional context–an intensive English program for international students at a large language school in Miami, Florida. We conduct formal assessments using a full-length simulated TOEIC (a norm-referenced… Read more: The Dilemmas of Language Assessment