A little bit about me

Hello, everyone.

My name is Kwangmin Lee, and I am a first-year doctoral student of ESL and Foreign Language Education of School of Education. I am currently working as an RA for Dr. Lia Plakans, whose areas of academic interest parallel exactly to those of mine: assessment of integrated L2 writing.

I speak Korean as my first language, and English is my foreign language. I can read (silently) a bit of Chinese as well, as I have been taught Chinese characters (both complex and simplified) as part of formal curriculum during elementary and middle school years.

The only type of writing that I do these days is academic writing, and it is mediated exclusively by English. Even though Korean is my mother tongue, as I have never been exposed to academic articles written in Korean, I might find reading and writing in Korean in an academic manner extremely challenging to do.

Aside from academic writing, I cannot think of any kind of writing that I do. But I enjoy reading Foreign affairs, which is a bi-monthly journal dealing with international and diplomatic issues of the U.S., and reading New York Times. 

In Spring 2016, I prepared students at a vocational college for standardized English tests, such as TOEIC, a requirement for employment in Korea. In Fall 2017, during my last semester at Teachers College, Columbia University, I took a teaching practicum course, for which time I worked with students from all around the world to improve their English language skills that they need to survive in New York City. My interest in L2 assessment, with specific focus on integrated writing (reading-to-write tasks), started during this teaching experience, as I created and developed tests for assessment of my learners. 

As implied above, I am interested in developing my expertise in assessment of second language integrated writing, and for this reason, I take such relevant courses as statistics. And I believe this course will provide me with foundational knowledge in theory and practice of second language writing.