Piyathida Sereebenjapol

EdD (Candidate), Instructional Technology, Northern Illinois University
MA, Applied Linguistics, Mahidol University, Thailand
BA, German, Chulalongkorn University , Thailand

My name is Piyathida Sereebenjapol. I come from Thailand. Everyone calls me “Pooh.” Yes! It is like Winnie the Pooh. Although my real nickname in Thai is not quite pronounced that way, I let people refer to me that way because it helps people remember me and my name. In fact, I always like it when people can say my first name, Piyathida. I am very proud of my name, because Piyathida means “beloved daughter.” My parents gave this wonderful name to me. They really love me and I love them.

I also love learning foreign languages. My mom is the one who first opened my world to a foreign language. She taught me English when I was five years old and that really inspired me to learn more and more about English and other foreign languages later. I started learning German in high school and continued taking it as a major when I got into the Faculty of Arts at Chulalongkorn University. I was also granted a scholarship from the Government of Germany to study German in Berlin for a semester. Because I like learning foreign languages, I also took courses in Mandarin, Korean and Portuguese. I continued studying about foreign languages and how to teach them in a graduate school. Finally, I became an English instructor and had been teaching English at a university in Thailand for 4 years.

Because of my knowledge of foreign languages, I was awarded several scholarships to go study abroad. One of them was a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistantship (FLTA). With this assistantship, I came to Northern Illinois University in 2006 as an FLTA to teach Thai. After I gained a lot of great experience at NIU, I decided to pursue a doctoral degree in Instructional Technology, which I hope to use to learn more about using technologies in teaching and learning. Additionally, I had a chance to assist Professor Hartmann and Dr. Olson to teach Thai from beginning to advanced courses until now. Therefore, I can apply knowledge I have learned from graduate courses to my teaching. All this experience has really helped me improve my teaching skills. Now, I am a graduate assistant at the Learning Center where I also learn more about technologies and foreign language teaching and learning.

My hobbies

Apart from languages, I love dancing. I had been studying Thai classical dancing for 15 years. I have performed Thai classical dances many times at NIU and other universities in Illinois. I also play a Thai classical music instrument called “So Duang” in my spare time. Recently, I started a new hobby, horseback riding. My horse is named Scotch, and he is really nice to me. We have become good friends.

E-mail Piyathida Sereebenjapol