Bio
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Dr. Soter is Associate Professor in English Education, College of Education at OSU and arrived at OSU in 1986. Born in Austria, she grew up in the Australian outback and spent most of her pre-US adult life in Sydney. Prior to completing a Ph.D (major focus: Applied Linguistics and Education) at the University of Illinois, she gained a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and History at the University of Western Australia (Perth, Australia) and a Master of Arts in English (cognates in Applied Linguistics and Australian Literature) at the University of Sydney, Australia. Aside from her academic writing, she has written poetry and short fiction on and off since 1994, although the great spurt came since about 2001. On the academic side, she has presented at many conferences on language and literacy including presentations on contrastive rhetoric and writing in a second language, has published a number of books on reading and writing in middle and high school, and is currently working on two additional books – a book on language as a field of energy and a text for middle and high school language instruction from a functional-rhetorical perspective for which she has a contract with Merrill/Pearson Publishers. Dr. Soter’s dissertation (Writing: A Third Language for Second Language Learners) was heavily influenced by Robert Kaplan’s work in Contrastive Rhetoric. Her work in the past five years has focused on the use of small group discussion as a mechanism for the development of high-level thinking, although she continues to hold to her interest in contrastive/comparative rhetoric and its pedagogical applications.