English as a Second Language (ESL)
I came to teaching through an unusual path: building free English-practice tools and a storytelling competition with my wife Ploy for students in Isan, Thailand, and watching what happens when a language learner finally has a safe place to say a word out loud. That work is what convinced me to pursue my own ESL teaching certification.
Before I ever set foot in a certification program, I spent years building things for ESL teachers and learners in Thailand — not as a licensed educator, but as someone married into the work. My wife Ploy and I started ESLteacher.com, a job board for working ESL teachers, out of a small office off Tha Phae Road in Chiang Mai, and I later built EnglishTeacher.com, a free vocabulary-practice tool, and the Isan Storytelling Championship at USAEnglish.com — a competition that gives students in rural Isan a real stage to perform in English.
English matters to me because I watched what it does for people up close, long before I could put a name to the pedagogy. Ploy taught herself English from cassette tapes starting at age nine, in a village outside Surin, with no teacher and no classroom — and that path, self-taught and stubborn, is the one I think about every time I sit down to plan a lesson. It is why I care more about giving a learner a safe place to say a word out loud than about getting the grammar perfect on the first try.
What convinced me to pursue my own ESL certification wasn't a single moment — it was years of watching kids in village schools across Isan light up over a few words of English, and realizing I wanted the training to back up the instinct. I want to bring the same qualities into my own classroom that I've watched work in theirs: patience, real encouragement, and lessons built around students actually speaking, not just memorizing.
"A language learner doesn't need a perfect sentence — they need a safe place to say the first word out loud."
I believe English learning succeeds or fails on whether a student feels safe enough to speak, not on how well they can conjugate a verb on paper. That belief comes directly from watching students in village schools across Isan — kids who know far more English than they'll ever risk saying out loud, because they're afraid of getting it wrong in front of their friends. Good teaching, to me, means lowering that fear before you raise the difficulty: real encouragement, low-pressure practice, and treating every attempt at a new word as a win worth celebrating. I want a classroom where students speak first and polish later, because the polishing only happens once they've stopped being afraid to try.
Navigate to each section using the links below or the menu above.
Reading, writing, vocabulary, and discussion strategies for teaching English to English learners.
Syllabi, assignments, reflections, and artifacts from each course in the certification program.
Field placement documentation, observation logs, reflections, and professional growth.
Evidence mapped to all 10 InTASC standards for beginning teacher preparation and licensing.
Organizations, research, tools, and supplemental materials for your subject area.
Additional pages for professional development, presentations, and other materials.
Village school visits, the Isan Storytelling Championship, and other community work in Thailand.