Director of First-Year Writing and ESOL, Visiting Assistant Professor
Office: Spaulding 201, Henniker
Phone: 603.428.2439
Email: ndecoteau@nec.edu
Educational Background
PhD in Composition and Applied Linguistics, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA (anticipated 2021)
MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Language, Saint Michael’s College
BA in English, University of New Hampshire
Research Interests
• Attrition in the composition course
• Hegemony of academic language
• World Englishes and translanguaging
• Narrative inquiry
• New materialism theoretical framework
Bio
Nicole Decoteau came to NEC after teaching English abroad in South Korea and Morocco. In addition to her teaching duties, she was the primary author on a series of graded readers developed for middle school students and she developed curriculum for adult learners in business-related fields. She came to NEC in 2015 as an adjunct professor but soon fell in love with the community and jumped at the opportunity to develop the English as a Second or Other Language (ESOL) program and serve as the program’s director. In her PhD program, she was introduced to linguistic justice, the decolonization of academic English, translanguaging, and retention studies that she now uses in her position as Director of First-year Writing. She has been a speaker at regional TESOL affiliate conferences, the national Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), Seoul National University of Technology, and the TESL Nova Scotia Atlantic Conference. In service to the profession, Nicole has aided the New Hampshire Department of Education in reviewing ESOL teacher certification programs, been a board member of the Northern New England TESOL affiliate, and reviewed manuscripts for an open-access composition journal. As of 2021, she is conducting narrative-inquiry research to investigate factors of attrition in the composition classroom for her dissertation. Outside of professional interests, Nicole enjoys travel and has visited each continent, with the exception of Antarctica. She spends most of her time outdoors with her three dogs.