The NorthStar Series, Second Edition

About the Series Editors

Frances Boyd, Ed.D. is a Senior Lecturer in the American Language Program at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1980. She began her career teaching English in Mexico and, after moving to New York, taught Spanish and directed an ESL program for new immigrants. In addition to teaching academic English, she enjoys training teachers, which she has done abroad, at Teachers' College, Columbia, and at TESOL Convention workshops. She is interested in Business English (Making Business Decisions, Pearson, 1994) as well as in storytelling (Stories from Lake Wobegon with audio by Garrison Keillor, Pearson, 1990). She has developed a series of Internet-based English courses. Frances is married to Carlos Velazquez, a painter and art teacher who grew up in Mexico and Peru. She loves languages and is currently learning the language of sports from their two sons, Alex and Teddy. She also loves music. Whenever she can, she plays violin with a chamber orchestra or quartets with friends.
 
Carol Numrich is a senior lecturer at American Language Program, Columbia University, where she has taught since 1983. She has traveled internationally for NorthStar and Columbia business to Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Venezuela. Carol worked at LaGuardia Community College for a number of years, as teacher, administrator, and program developer. She received her Ed.D. from Teachers' College in 1991, where she went back to help run the TESOL MA Program from 1993-1996. During this time she was also on loan as a visiting professor. Carol lived in Switzerland for four years, where she was the Directrice Pedagogique in a language school. Her English teaching career began some years before that in Alaska, where she taught Indian and Eskimo children.
 
 Carol is married to Eric Cooper, who is the President of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education. They have two young children: Justin, who just turned 9, and Haley who is 7. Carol is author of Face the Issues, Consider the Issues, and Raise the Issues.


About the Authors

Laurie Barton loves writing and has published short stories in literary magazines. Her other passions include playing classical music on the piano and riding her Arabian horse, Lenin. She also enjoys jogging on the beach and roller blading in the park. She has been teaching ESL since 1984. She loves her job because it gives her a chance to meet people from all over the world.

After four years as a high school English, Spanish, Latin, and Religious Studies teacher in Worcester, Massachusetts, John Beaumont moved to New York City in 1991 to pursue graduate studies in TESOL and to have a taste of life in the big city. He has been teaching ESL at Columbia University's American Language Program since 1994. He has also taught in the MA TESOL program at Teachers College, Columbia University, and trained middle and high school EFL teachers at Korea University in Seoul. His professional interests include teacher education and teaching beginning-level ESL learners. Outside TESOL, John enjoys the pleasures that New York City has to offer: restaurants, parks, diversity, yoga, and real estate windowshopping.
 
If Robert F. Cohen were to think of a keyword that could readily generate thoughts about "who he is," he would say that the word "language" probably best opens the door to such reveries. As a child growing up in New York, he was always fascinated when he heard English being spoken by people whose accents suggested that they came from backgrounds totally different from his own. To be sure, this fascination at an early age with people of different "tongues" explains the general thrust behind his passion for foreign language study (French, German, Hebrew, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian), and his pursuit of degrees in French language and literature at Queens College (B.A.), Columbia University (M.A.), and Harvard University (Ph.D.). Learning other languages to understand himself and others better has been the focus of his life's work. Throughout his professional career as a writer and teacher, Robert has always maintained that his role as an educator has been to go beyond the confines of the subject matter itself in order to arrive at a more "concrete" goal - that of teaching people to have compassion for one another.
 
Andy and Laura English met in 1984 while teaching at the Colegio Bennett School in the beautiful city of Cali, Colombia. While living in Cali, they traveled extensively in Ecuador and Peru as well as in other parts of Colombia. Three years later they moved to Barcelona, Spain and taught at the Instituto de Estúdios Norteamericanos. During their three years in Spain, in addition to teaching, they visited many regions of Spain and Portugal and spent two Christmases in Paris. In 1989, on a trip back to the States, they were married in an outdoor ceremony on Cape Cod. They then returned to "España" for one final year before moving to the Boston area where they have lived for the past ten years.
 
In addition to writing NorthStar and Business Across Cultures (Laura), they are both active in the Boston ESL community. Andy is an associate professor in the ESOL Department at Roxbury Community College where he has been for the last ten years. Laura has worked as an adjunct at Roxbury and at Boston University, and is now coordinating an ESL program for the American Red Cross. She is also working on some content development projects.
 
When not teaching, Andy and Laura can usually be found at their cottage on Cape Cod, swimming, riding their road bikes, and playing with their six-year-old son, Sam, their masterpiece of "calipedia" (the supposed art of raising beautiful children).

Natasha Haugnes launched her ESL career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco in the late 1980s. She subsequently trained ESL teachers for the Peace Corps in various West African countries while completing graduate school in San Francisco. Natasha currently lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, John Tuttle, and sons Charlie (6), Emmet (4 1/2), and Oliver (2). For the past ten years, she has worked as an ESL teacher and, more recently, as an academic coach and teacher trainer at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. While not at her "day job" or her "mom job," Natasha plays guitar and tap dances in Quake City, a small early swing and blues band, with John.

Beth Maher lives in Oakland, California with her husband, her three young sons, and her big black and white dog, Maytag. Beth has been teaching ESL since the early 1990s. She has taught in community colleges, intensive language programs and at a local art college. At the moment, she works in hotels teaching workplace English to room cleaners and training new teachers in this area. When she's not teaching, writing, or planning lessons, she spends time chasing after her boys, camping, and working in the garden.

After Barnard and Columbia Graduate School in History, Judy L. Miller spent fifteen years in Paris, most of them teaching English at an engineering school of the Paris Chamber of Commerce. She remembers her first day in front of a class. The students all noisily stood up at attention when she entered the room. She was so insecure that she thought it was all an elaborate prank. "Sit down, immediately, all of you. What is the meaning of all this?" Total silence. Finally, one lone voice: " . . . a sign of respect." By the time she returned to New York with her daughter fifteen years later, she knew all about those silences. Whether in elementary schools, at community colleges, in adult education, at music conservatories, or back at Columbia University, where she is teaching now, the best part about teaching is the students.

Robin Mills is a California native and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1987. She has been a professional Sign Language interpreter for the deaf since 1983, nationally certified since 1987. In 1993, she received a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from San Francisco State University. Currently, she works as a community freelance interpreter. She most recently has taught ESL to deaf students at City College of San Francisco. She is a competitive swimmer, favoring distance open water swimming, and is also a fused glass artist. Her other hobbies include traveling, gardening, photography and cooking.

Sherry Preiss is the author of NorthStar: Listening and Speaking, Advanced, Second Edition. Sherry has been in the field of second language learning since 1976 serving as an administrator, teacher, writer, and teacher trainer, both in the U.S. and overseas. She received her Master of Arts Degree in TESOL/Bilingual Education from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Currently, Sherry is the Vice President of Multimedia and Skills for Pearson Longman ELT, based in White Plains, New York.

For the past several years, Sherry has traveled around the world speaking with teachers about Longman's multimedia programs, the Longman series NorthStar, True Colors, and Focus on Grammar, plus other issues in the field of ELT. Sherry is married to Rich Preiss and has two kids, Alex, 18, and Elyse, 15, who find her textbook writing and her travels both interesting and amusing. Sherry enjoys spinning, bike riding, reading, and trying to keep up with her teens' interests in music, sports, and politics.

Sherry loved writing the second edition of NorthStar and would be happy to hear directly from any student or teacher with questions or comments about the Advanced Level Listening and Speaking text. Please contact her directly at sherry.preiss@pearsoned.com.

Kim Sanabria was born in London's East End and in her early twenties, moved to France and then Spain, where she taught ESL and translation theory. She subsequently journeyed through Latin America, traveling from New York to Bolivia by bus. She now lives in New York City, where she teaches English and is involved in a number of language-learning endeavors.

For Jennifer Schmidt, teaching English has always been a passion. She thinks it's because she understands the challenges of being a foreign student, since she was one herself. Although English is her first language, she spent her childhood in Malaysia and Thailand before coming to America for college. She now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children. Jennifer began writing on the NorthStar series the week after her second child was born. It was challenging, but rewarding!  Currently, Jennifer is working as an assistant director of a preschool.  It's a diversion from ESL, but she has found that there are many transferable skills.  One of her newest projects at the school will be to help introduce a foreign language enrichment component to the curriculum.

Helen Solorzano lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the house where she grew up, with her husband, their two children, and her mother. She has taught English in the U.S. and in Lima, Peru. She enjoys the creativity involved in writing ESL textbooks and finds the process similar to putting together a giant puzzle. For Helen, NorthStar was an especially challenging project because of the fascinating topics involved. Other interests include technical writing for an international audience. She is a director of The TRAC Foundation (www.tracfoundation.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development of the TRAC computer programming language, which was developed by her late father.