About
Peter is a Georgia native who writes across a range of genres including essays, short stories, higher education and immigration opinion pieces, as well as best practices for teaching English as a second language. He has a Bachelor’s in English Studies and a Master’s in Applied Linguistics. You can find his work in The Bitter Southerner, Salvation South, SaportaReport, American City & County Magazine, Diverse:Issues in Higher Education, and several Routledge publications around Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching.
Articles and Stories
How Universities Can Support Undocumented Students as Federal Policies Continue to Threaten Them
Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
January, 2023
Immigrant high school students without citizenship or permanent residency in the U.S. are often told by high school counselors and colleges that they do not have many options for higher education. Known to many as Dreamers, DACA recipients, and undocumented students, it’s easy for them to slip through the cracks without getting the educational support or resources they deserve.
Georgia colleges must do what policy makers won’t: Oglethorpe University hosts conference focused on supporting undocumented students
SaportaReport
November, 2022
Last month, Oglethorpe University hosted the inaugural “Coalition and Community Building: Supporting Georgia’s Undocumented Students in Higher Education.” The conference was sponsored by the Atlanta Global Research and Education Collaborative (AGREC) and gathered...
The History of St. Nick
Salvation South
December 2021
My mom struggled with the Santa dilemma when my younger brother and I were kids. She remembered enjoying the magic of the old man in the sleigh as a child herself, but it also shook her faith when she discovered he wasn't real. Being a good Christian woman...
Academic Publications
Teaching English with Corpora: A Resource Book
Teaching verbs using learner-compiled corpora (Book Chapter)
It can be challenging to teach academic writing to a class of graduate students from a range of disciplines. Often, instructors must find effective ways to teach academic writing conventions to a student from Early Childhood Education sitting next to a student from the Physics department. The present lesson involves students compiling their own corpora from research articles in their fields and using AntConc (Anthony, 2020) to explore verb patterns (e.g. verb + gerund/infinitive) and frequencies (e.g. examine versus investigate) in specific disciplines to better inform their own writing.
Boğaziçi University Journal of Education
Corpus-Based Approaches in Language Teaching: Outcomes, Observations, and Teacher Perspectives
This paper is a synthesis of teacher perspectives, analyses of learner output and learner impressions, ideas for materials development, and summative researcher observations resulting from the implementation of a semester-long corpus-based and data-driven ESL instruction in two university-level settings in the U.S.
TESOL Applied Linguistics Interest Section (ALIS) Newsletter
Corpus Linguistics in TESOL: Doing What Works
A discussion of practical teaching applications for corpus linguistic tools, data, and research. Appeared in the September, 2019 TESOL newsletter.
Corpus Linguistics for English Teachers:
Tools, Online Resources, and Classroom Activities
An Eight-Week Corpus Based Writing Course for Academic Professionals (Book Chapter)
This chapter serves as an overview of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course designed to teach academic writing through the use of corpus tools to a group of visiting Chinese scholars from a range of disciplines.
LinguaArte Spanish Language School Blog
A collection of posts on the value of learning Spanish and the Spanish language's global influence.
These short entries served as a fun opportunity to write about language and culture for a colleague's Spanish language school website.