Thor Sawin

Thor Sawin (Professor, TFL/TESOL programs) is a linguist, applied linguist, and teacher of English and German as a foreign language, with over seventeen years of teaching experience at the undergraduate and graduate levels in Lithuania, Korea, China and the US, as well as shorter secondary-level programs in Korea, Taiwan and Albania. Thor is passionate about language learning as hospitality, balancing the cognitive and social aspects of language learning, and helping people identify and acquire the “ways of speaking” they will need to be effective cross-cultural collaborators.

At MIIS, he primarily teaches courses on linguistics (language acquisition, linguistic analysis, language and social policy, and applying technology to language learning) and on intercultural communication, and has also taught German at the Middlebury Language Schools, Middlebury College, and UC Santa Cruz.

Thor has presented research at over 50 refereed international and several regional conferences on topics within language teaching, multilingualism, and international development. His fieldwork in Eurasia focuses on language acquisition practices and policies for personnel within international organizations, and he co-organizes the International Congress on Language Learning for field learning policy makers and practitioners. Additionally, he leads workshops on applying second language acquisition, mobile technologies for language learning, field-based language learning, and creating task-based language learning materials for government organizations (such as the US Air Force and the US State Department), teaching organizations (such as Princeton University, the American Council of Hebrew Teachers), and several international development organizations.