Keith Folse was invited to deliver a plenary address on March 1st at the 41st annual Illinois Teachers of English as a Second Language (TESOL) — Bilingual Education convention in Chicago. His talk "Why Being a Native Speaker Does Not Make You an ESL Teacher" addressed the skills and knowledge needed to be an effective ESL teacher in different types of settings. He specifically addressed the challenges and successes of training novice teachers in UCF’s new Undergraduate Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), which has allowed many UCF students to teach overseas since its inception in 2011, including about 20 as Fulbright awardees.
UCF is one of only two Florida universities to have such a program at the undergraduate level. Dr. Folse’s trip was sponsored by National Geographic Learning.
Dr. Folse is professor of TESOL in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. His research concentrates on second language vocabulary acquisition.