Carnegie expert will lead English into future

Dudley Reynolds talked recently about the English language and its future: It's big and getting bigger.

“There’s no question that the number of people speaking or learning English is increasing exponentially, and that change isn’t going to stop anytime soon,” Reynolds said. “What it means to know English — in other words, what the standards are, what the rules are, what the normal way is to say something — those rules and conventions are changing rapidly. That’s something we have to acknowledge and talk about.”

A professor at Carnegie Mellon University Qatar (CMU-Q), Reynolds has been chosen to lead a group of industry professionals and policymakers at an upcoming summit in Greece to discuss the future of teaching English as a second language. The summit corresponds with the 50th anniversary of the TESOL International Association.

Carnegie Mellon came to grips with the need for quality English education shortly after it opened in 2004. David Kaufer, the head of the Department of English at the time, and Danielle Wetzel, director of the university’s first-year writing program in Pittsburgh, recruited Reynolds in 2007.

“Opening the campus in Qatar forced the issue,” Kaufer said. “It was time for us to come to grips with the fact that while we have a writing program that is perhaps one of the best American writing programs in the country, we now needed to aspire to be one of the best writing programs in the world for global English.”