Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

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My name is David Hanks, and I teach first-year Russian at PCC. I’m a seasoned language teacher, university instructor, and researcher of language teaching and learning. I also teach courses in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Portland State University, and I am currently finishing up my Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. I’m not yet “Dr. Hanks,” but I will be very very soon!

I am originally from Beaverton, OR, and my career as an educator and researcher actually began at PCC! My interest in language, linguistics, and Russian first took shape when I enrolled in Kristine Shmakov‘s Russian language course. At the time I had been working toward a degree in science, with an eye toward an eventual career in astrophysics (???). Although I still love astronomy, to this day I vividly remember standing in line at the PCC Sylvania bookstore, opening up the required textbook for Russian, seeing an entirely new and inscrutable alphabet, and thinking, ¡°This is what I want to do!¡± I changed my academic plans entirely in that moment, and the rest is history!

After two years studying Russian at PCC, I transferred to PSU to complete my Bachelor of Arts in Russian Language & Literature and also decided to double major in Applied Linguistics. In my senior year I had an amazing opportunity to do an internship working at the American Center Library of the Linguistics University of Nizhny Novogord (§¯§Ú§Ø§Ö§Ô§à§â§à?§Õ§ã§Ü§Ú§Û §Ô§à§ã§å§Õ§Ñ?§â§ã§ä§Ó§Ö§ß§ß§í§Û §Ý§Ú§Ô§Ó§Ú§ã§ä§Ú?§é§Ö§ã§Ü§Ú§Û §å§ß§Ú§Ó§Ö§â§ã§Ú§ä§Ö?§ä) in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, where I tutored students learning American English, kick-starting my interest in language education.

Since graduating from PSU, I have been very fortunate to be able to return to Russia many times over the years to visit my Russian friends, take friends and family with me to experience the culture, and to travel across the entire country on the Trans-Siberian Railway (all the way from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg). I have also been able to travel and use my Russian abilities to communicate with people in many other countries, including Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, and even in Japan and Indonesia.

Being able to speak Russian has even saved my life, literally! While hiking through a remote and mountainous part of northwestern Georgia with a friend from New Zealand, we got lost without any food or camping gear. In the middle of the very cold night while walking down a deserted road we noticed headlights in the distance and flagged down a car. None of the three people in the car spoke any English, but they all spoke Russian as a second language. Because of this, I was able to explain¡ªusing the Russian I had learned at PCC and PSU!¡ªthat we had gotten lost and were trying to get to the next town to find a place to sleep. They were able to give us a lift to safety, but who knows what we would have done had I not known any Russian! ?

None of these life experiences nor my career successes in academia would have been possible without first learning Russian at PCC. As a Russian instructor, my central goal is to help provide my students the same kinds of access to new life opportunities and career trajectories through learning Russian.

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Publications

Thorne, S. L., Hellermann, J., Hanks, D. H., Sydorenko, T., LeWarne, A., Martin-Long, C., & Wang, H. (forthcoming). “That’s worth investigating”: Toward conversational human-generative AI interaction. Language Teaching Research.

Hanks, D. H. (forthcoming). Eat, pray, love, speak: The commodification of language education for tourism in Bali [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Pennsylvania.

Hornberger, N. H., Anzures Tapia, A., Hanks, D. H., Kvietok Due?as, F., & Lee, S. (2018). Ethnography of language planning and policy. Language Teaching, 51(2), 152¨C186. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444817000428

Hanks, D. H. (2017). Policy barriers to Ainu language revitalization in Japan: When globalization means English. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 32(1), 91¨C110. https://wpel.gse.upenn.edu/s2017#hanks