Deborah Anne Abbott

After attending public schools in Essex Jct., Vermont, USA, Deborah Abbott completed her B.A. at Haverford College (Pennsylvania), where she majored in History. Her studies for the BA included many courses taken at Bryn Mawr College and at the Middlebury College French Summer Language School. She studied for an M.A. in European History at the University of Rochester (New York) and continued in the Ph.D. program working on an uncompleted dissertation in seventeenth-century French history. After doing archival research in Europe and earning a diploma in teaching French as a foreign language from the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland), she abandoned the Ph.D. in favor of remunerated employment. In Istanbul she taught high school English and occasionally French for nine years and advised English and French-language Model United Nations clubs as well as a EU-sponsored Comenius Project in biodiversity in conjunction with Cent High School’s partner schools in Germany, Poland, Spain, and Italy. She volunteered, on stage and off, with Speech Bubbles, Istanbul’s premier amateur theater group and wrote and directed English plays for high school students. While in Istanbul she completed a CELTA with the British Council and then studied summers and on-line for an MA TESOL from Saint Michael’s College (Vermont, USA) as well as teaching French to high school students in the total immersion Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy. In 2014 she came to Al Khobar to work at Prince Mohammad bin Fahd University. At PMU in 2016 she served on the Curriculum Committee and in 2015 on the PMU Student Magazine, the Enhanced Learning, and the Research & Professional Development Colloquium committees. She is a member of TESOL International and of the KSAALT TESOL, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Association of Language Teachers, as well as TESOL Arabia. With KSAALT she served as Chapter Representative for the KSAALT Khobar Chapter 2015-2016 and currently serves as President of the KSAALT TESOL Executive Council.