Marla Mahar is a Lecturer and Business Communication Lead Instructor for the Management Department. Want to know more about our department? Go to
https://business.okstate.edu/departments_programs/management/index.html for more information!
Transcript:
Marla Mahar. Okay so what year did you start at Spears? Lets see, it would be 2010, Fall of 2010. Okay and since then what courses have you taught? I started teaching 3113, which is our writing course. In 2014, I started a course called International Communication which is business communication for international students called BCOM 3443. My undergrad was at Oklahoma Christian University of science and art in Edmond. I was in a program called TEFL, which is unusual for colleges to have. It's Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Then my masters was here at OSU in TESL, Teaching English as a Second Language.
3113 and 3443 are the exact same course. 3443 is just you know more relaxed style and it's a little lower paced than 3113. So, practicality definitely and then getting them ready for when they go into an organization within their country which most of them do, then they're ready for conversing or communicating with English speakers and english as their first language speakers.
Then of course writing, so writing to them. Writing is the most difficult skill. For some of these International students where are they from? They're mostly from China in the past few years because there has been a great program started by the university called the 2+2 program and it is a program where we have like a sister college and they take agriculture there or agribusiness most of them are an accurate business and they take two years of classes there and then they come to Oklahoma State and finish their last two years here.
So I have a lot of students from China and then I also get some others from other parts of campu. I've had Koreans and I've had a lot of Middle Eastern students actually from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, some Vietnamese students.
