Welcome!  Thank you for your interest in my e-learning course, English Across America.

I’m Cindy Richard, a Learning Experience Designer (LXD) with twenty years of experience in education.  Most of those years were spent in K-12 classrooms, where I taught English Language Arts, Social Studies, and other subjects.  I also advised student Drama Clubs, directed many student theater productions, coached youth baseball and basketball teams, and organized school events such as spelling bees and speech contests.  I recently completed a M.Ed. in Educational Technology, with graduate certificates in Online Instructional Design, E-Learning, and Technology Leadership in Education.

Although I’m not a subject matter expert in Linguistics, I do find the subject fascinating!  English at its most basic is already a delightful, chaotic hodgepodge of influences from other languages.  Diving deeper to explore national and regional dialects across English-speaking countries is a wild ride.  My division of the continental United States into five geographical regions for this course is an oversimplification, but it serves our limited scope in comparing some of those regional differences.  Just know that there’s a great deal of variety within each region, and there is further linguistic variation in the areas of the U.S. I left out: Hawaii, Alaska, and territories such as Puerto Rico.

Every region offers cultural and geographic treasures to enjoy and oddities to make you smile.  I lived in the Southwest region for most of my life, growing up in Texas and spending most of my teaching career in New Mexico.  I also lived for five years in Illinois and Iowa (the Midwest,) and for the last four years in New York (the Northeast.)  I have friends in the other regions, as well.  All of the regional variations you hear in this course sound normal to me!  People do pick up on the differences, though.  When I moved from Texas to Illinois for college in 2001, I habitually used “y’all” in my speech.  My classmates were mostly from the Chicago suburbs and grinned at my Southern accent. As soon as I had lived outside of Texas for a while, I noticed that I had stopped saying “y’all” – and had instead acquired the Northern Cities Vowel Shift that makes the vowel in “block” shift more towards “black.”  Without realizing it, I had started code-switching to assimilate with my Midwestern friends and relatives.  Language is a fluid thing, constantly adapting and innovating, and speakers of a language adapt and change right along with it.

I wish you all the best in your studies and your exploration of the English language.  If you have any questions about the course or about the United States, feel free to reach out with this contact form: https://crrichard.net/Contact-Me/