Becoming a Language Teacher: A Practical Guide to Second Language Learning and Teaching

Elaine Horwitz is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Director of the Graduate Program in Foreign Language Education at the University of Texas at Austin. She was born in Washington, DC, and attended the Montgomery County, MD, public schools where she studied French and Spanish. She began her language teaching career in seventh grade when other students would ask her to explain what her teacher was saying.

 

Professor Horwitz earned her BA at the University of Maryland at College Park and her MA and PhD in Second Language Learning and Teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While there, she was a Title VII Bilingual Education Fellow and supervised foreign language, ESL, and bilingual student teachers.

 

She first taught French, Spanish, and English in the Prince George’s County, MD, public schools and later went on to teach at University High School in Urbana, IL, and as a Graduate Assistant at the University of Illinois. Before moving to the University of Texas, she taught courses in French, language teaching methodology, and bilingual education at the State University College of New York at Buffalo.

 

At the University of Texas, Professor Horwitz is Director of the Graduate Program in Foreign Language Education and teaches courses in language teaching methodology, second language acquisition, language testing, and second language research methods. She is well known for her research on language anxiety and student and teacher beliefs about language learning. In addition to numerous scholarly articles and chapters, she is the co-editor with Dolly Young of Language Anxiety: From Theory and Practice to Classroom Implications. Her assessment tools, the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale and the Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory, are widely used to help teachers and researchers better understand the needs of second language learners. She has been an invited lecturer and consultant on improving language teaching throughout the world.