ELL tutor in the PLTC. I work with students whose first language is not English with their written assignments

My first job after college was teaching deaf teenagers sign language. It was fascinating to learn what they understood about the world and the challenges they faced having reached adolescence educated in a system that forbade manual communication. This experience sparked my interest in syntax. After a stint in The Caption Center at WGBH TV preparing materials for deaf viewers, I pursued my doctorate in linguistics. My dissertation involved the development of a prototype program that created abstracts of hard news stories based on their syntactic structure. I spent the next few decades in the language industry: working on a spelling corrector at Houghton Mifflin, developing an automatic legal citation tool in the R&D division at LexisNexis, and finally, collaborating with a team to produce a machine translation software package that automatically translates English text to Japanese text. This involved creating a heavily annotated online dictionary of English and accompanying grammar for our parser. When this company folded thanks to Google Translate, I decided to return to the type of work I found most satisfying — talking to humans, as opposed to computers, about language. I’ve worked at several area universities as a writing tutor for almost a decade.