Guest Speaker: Charles Hall on English Language in American Culture

• Date: Monday, October 25, 2010
• Time: 16:00
• Topic: English Language in American Culture

Dr. Charles Hall, Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, Department of English, completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Florida in 1983 and joined the faculty at the University of Memphis in 1984. He served as Coordinator of ESL and the M.A. Concentration in TESL/TEFL in the Department of English from 1990-1997. He is being recognized with the CASDRA in the area of Engaged Scholarship.

Dr. Hall has also been recognized at the University of Memphis with a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1989 and 2006. He also received the Outstanding Faculty Award from Student Disability Services in 2009. He has received a Senior Fulbright Lecturing Award for the Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia twice (1989, 1993).

Charles Hall has done teacher training sponsored by various organizations, such as the U.S. Department of State and the United Nations, in almost 30 countries. Hall has held two Senior Fulbright awards. He has been coordinator of University of West Bohemia's Summer TEFL training courses in the Czech Republic since 1990 and was founder and director of TEFL summer training at Peking University for several years. Hall's newest book is the co-authored American Legal English (2nd ed. University of Michigan Press, 2007). He was the 2005 Chair of the ESP Interest Section for International TESOL.

In his letter of nomination, Dr. Eric Link writes, “For over a decade, Professor Hall has been building communities in the legal English field….he has created legal English curricula, courses, workshops, and training programs in countries such as Armenia, Kosovo, Croatia, Serbia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Romania, Albania, Sudan, and Iraq….Dr. Hall is the very model of the professor who is not content to conduct his scholarship behind the closed and narrow confines of an academic building. He has built his career on opening doors to English language literacy in countries around the world.”