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Meg Frost is the winner of the 2010 ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) Teacher of the Year Award,

sponsored by The New York Times. Ms. Frost is a lead ESOL teacher at Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow. During

the selection process, the committee noted her collaborative efforts with civic and volunteer organizations to engage

her students as well as her commitment to furthering their professional development. Now in its fourth year, the ESOL award program recognizes educators who have consistently excelled in helping adult students learn English and develop the skills they need to create successful new lives in the United States. In addition to the winner, The Times also recognized four outstanding ESOL professionals: Caryn T. Davis, CUNY Language Immersion Program (CLIP) instructor, College of Staten Island; Thomas

A. Miller, teacher and teacher trainer, the Riverside Language Program; and Hsiao-wei Yang, ESOL instruction coordinator,

The Door. The Times has also given a special acknowledgement to the late Dr. Linda Ann Kunz, adjunct associate professor, The English Language Center, LaGuardia Community College, for the important role she played in the lives of students and her leadership in the ESOL/adult literacy field.

Yuhui Andrew Ding has published a book which he has written in English, his second language. Aged only 14, Andrew began writing Warrior Soul, his book for young adults, a year after moving from China to the United States in 2005 to join his mother, who had come here for postdoctoral work. Andrew joined an ESL program after becoming depressed about being isolated by the language barrier. His story features a child who is given extraordinary powers to battle a villain. Andrew said, “I was angry and just frustrated. Sometimes I would just feel sad,” he said. “I would turn away people because I had no choice.” Writing the book improved his self-esteem and his teacher noticed that Andrew’s humor became based on puns – evidence of his growing confidence with language. Andrew’s next challenge is to translate his book into Chinese “so the people back in China could read it,” he said.

I srael’s Tel Aviv University has won the world’s largestdebating tournament in the ESL category. Team members, Yoni Cohen-Idov and Uri Merhav, won the finals for non native English speakers after a 10-day competition which was held at Koc University in Turkey. During the final round, Cohen-Idov and Merhav were asked to debate in favor of banning the positive depiction of war criminals in the media. After returning to Israel, Cohen-Idov told news site Ynet: “We were raffled to take sides on a very difficult subject, which is banning the positive depiction of war-criminals. We gave a winning argument by saying that freedom of speech must be curbed when there is a probability it might lead to incitement and violence.” Cohen-Idov praised the spirit of the debate community. “No one cares about nationality or race. Even members of the delegations from Qatar, Iraq and Malaysia acted as our friends and congratulated us.”

Former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said that Singapore’s insistence on bilingual education had been wrong. In 1965, Lee made the country strictly English-speaking but with the rise of China as a global power, Lee hoped to make the country bilingual, by having children educated in both English and Chinese from 1984. “Nobody can master two languages at the same level. If (you think) you can, you’re deceiving yourself. My daughter is a neurologist, and late in my life she told me language ability and intelligence are two different things,” Lee told Channel NewsAsia. “Successive generations of students paid a heavy price, because of my ignorance, by my insistence on bilingualism.”