Charles Hall in Cusco, Peru How has your career afforded you the opportunity to travel abroad? I’ve used teaching/exploring English as a tool to work in almost 40 countries (some which don’t even exist anymore!) and to work for organizations such as the U.S. Department of States, the European Union, and the United Nations.
Faculty Spotlight A CONVERSATION WITH PROFESSOR CHARLES HALL, PH.D., DR.H.C. OF THE DEPARTMENT ENGLISH, APPLIED LINGUISTICS PROGRAM Please tell us about yourself and your position at the University of Memphis (U of M).
Please tell us about your first experience with study abroad.
I’m an applied linguist in the Department of English and have been at U of M since 1984 when I came from the University of Florida to help start our Teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language programs that now have a B.A., an M.A. and a Ph.D.
What is your role in study abroad here at the U of M?
After spending much of my youth living in a forest in the middle of nowhere in Michigan, I went off to a boys’ school in Hamburg, then West Germany. That was over 40 years ago. Hamburg is in the north of Germany where at that time there weren’t many foreigners and no English speakers. This was long before computers or Skype; international phone calls were the equivalent of about $8 a minute, and even letters took at least a week to be delivered, so I was pretty much on my own. It was scary at first since my German was rudimentary but it quickly got better because it had to!
My very grand goal is help make it possible for every U of M student, faculty and staff to have a study abroad experience because I know it can be life-changing. My daily role is directing two study abroad programs in the Department of English that give people the introductory credential to teach English as a Foreign Language overseas [TEFL Certificate]. One is in the Czech Republic each July, and the other is in Spain each June. I also talk to people informally about their study abroad opportunities using my own experiences and those of past participants.
Gradually, I found my way and was actually first in my French and math classes! But let’s not talk about the classes I didn’t pass. I even toured around Northern Germany as last cellist in the Hamburg Youth Orchestra. They let me in the orchestra because I was an American and it allowed them to say they were international. I really was pathetic as a musician but I loved the experience. I learned lots about Europe and the world, but it’s more important for me to say that I learned more about who I was and what it meant to be an American.
In my job, I use language to explore and to help better the world by giving people an important tool, English, and by encouraging people understand why they do/believe what they do.
When I first came to Memphis in 1984, I thought I might be “stuck” in the USA, but when I was awarded my first Senior Fulbright in 1989 to then Czechoslovakia, my life changed dramatically and forever. I was teaching at Charles University in Prague when the Velvet Revolution began. There I watched young mothers with children and frail old men demand their freedom after decades of repressive, totalitarian “Communism.” I was in the right place at the right time with the right skills. The so-called “Communist” government, which was really just a dictatorship with a fancy name, hadn’t let many people learn English because it gave them too much information about the Western democracies, so I was asked to help set up a temporary summer program to teach professors and college students English. They needed English to gain new information and form new contacts. I saw firsthand how by controlling language, you can control a nation. I thought the intensive summer English program would last a year or two. This summer I will be there for the 24th year. Almost immediately I began to involve the University of Memphis community in that program and now hundreds of people from Memphis and nearby have been to Pilsen, the Czech Republic for a glorious summer of hard work and great pleasure. Importantly, along the way I transitioned from being a general ESL teacher to a specialist in legal language and curriculum development. Because I’m one of the few people with that specialty, I’m routinely invited by the U.S. Department of State, the United Nations, and the European Union to CONTINUED ON BACK PAGE