William Snyder has been appointed interim director of the master’s degree program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) at the Teachers College Japan campus.

Snyder takes over for Terry Royce, head of the program since 1999, who has joined the University of Technology Sydney in Australia as a senior lecturer. Snyder, whose appointed was effective February 1, has extensive overseas experience, having spent nearly 12 years teaching in English and teacher education programs in South Korea, Turkey and Armenia. He became a lecturer in the TESOL and Applied Linguistics programs at TC in August of 2008.

 

In addition to becoming interim director of the TESOL Japan program, Snyder, who has a Ph.D. in linguistics from Northwestern University, will also assume Royce’s duties as administrative director of the campus. Snyder’s research interests focus on applying flow and self-determination theories to language teacher motivation and learner engagement.

 

Although TC has a gifted education program based in Long Island and a music education program in Taiwan, the Tokyo site is the College’s only officially accredited branch campus. TC Professor Emeritus John Fanselow founded the campus in collaboration with Professor Leslie Beebe in 1987. In 2006, TC’s international and comparative education programs began offering summer courses at the Tokyo campus.