Department of Secondary Education

Foreign Language Education/ESOL Faculty

Dr. Deoksoon Kim, assistant professor of Secondary Education, teaches foreign language education and ESOL. Her foci include TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and reading and literacy education, ESL and bilingual education, multicultural pedagogy, and qualitative research. Dr. Kim holds a bachelor’s degree in English language and literature. Her Masters of Arts in Secondary Education with TESOL emphasis and Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies with TESOL and literacy concentration are from the University of New Mexico. She taught several courses including a Master’s Seminar in Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies; Literacy Across Cultures; and Second Language Literacy at the University of New Mexico before coming to USF.

Background/ Teaching

With 14 years of teaching and research experience in K–12 including ESL, EFL, and higher education settings, she served as an English teacher in public-school settings including elementary and high schools and an academic director at Neo English Academy in Korea. Dr. Kim also was former president and founder of the Tip-Top Kids English School, which developed an EFL program for elementary students from low-income families from 1996 to 2000; she has a strong background in EFL program development, professional development, partnerships with elementary schools, and program operations. Dr. Kim was a workshop presenter at the Latin American Program, part of the professional development program, Chilean educators: Learning Communities and the Teaching of English (DICA). She also organized and conducted several workshops of ESL teaching methods for educational assistants through the Career Ladder Program at the Multicultural Bilingual Education Center of the University of New Mexico. She was an invited speaker at the Research Stoplight Series, College of Education at the University of New Mexico and presented her research in several national and international conferences.

Research/Scholarship/Service

Dr. Kim conducted research related to Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Literacy, and was awarded the “Northern Mobility Project: Multicultural Perspectives in Educational Research,”  while being hosted at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Her research interests extend to Second Language Learning and Teaching, ESL Teaching Methods, First and Second Language Literacy, Multicultural Pedagogy, Professional Development in Teacher Education, and Qualitative Research. She received the Dunifon Scholarship, the Nancy Fraser Doctoral Fellowship, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of New Mexico. She served as a member of the Navajo Nation Teacher Education Consortium 2005 to support the Navajo Nation Secondary Teacher Education Program. She also participated in the COE International Task Force Initiatives and Academic Program Review at the University of New Mexico.