2019 Teacher of the Year — Dr. Kara Mac Donald
The Committee is please to announce that the winner of the 1st ever Teacher of the Year Award is Dr. Kara Mac Donald. She officially received the award at the opening ceremoney of the 2019 International Conference.
Kara Mac Donald is an Associate Professor at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA. She conducts pre-service and in-service faculty training and offers academic support to students. She maintains a close connection to the English language classroom as a part-time ELL instructor for children and young adults in ESL, academic writing and academic test preparation courses. She has been a member of KOTESOL since 2006 and active in a variety of roles, and has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Korea TESOL Journal since 2014. Her background consists of over twenty-five years in foreign language teaching, teacher training, curriculum design and faculty development across elementary, secondary and higher education in the U.S. and overseas. She earned a Masters in Applied Linguistics, TESOL and a Doctorate in Applied Linguistics.
Korea TESOL Lifetime Membership Recipient — José Franco
As she is already a lifetime member, Kara opted to gift the lifetime membership part of the award to her colleague José Franco.
José Franco is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages at University of The Andes in Trujillo State, Venezuela. He provides training to pre-service EFL teachers and teaches ESP to diverse types of professionals. He is coordinator of the English Language Area in his university and has been an active member of TESOL International since 2016, VenTESOL Trujillo state representative since 2017 and assistant manager/editor of the KoTESOL webpage InterComm Chapter since 2018. He earned a MEd in TEFL and his research interests include CALL, corpus linguistics, lexicon and interrupted education.
