About Us

Gary Carkin is an actor, theater director, and Professor of TESOL. He has worked with language, culture, and drama for over forty years, having majored in Speech and Drama at the University of New Hampshire, acting and directing at Carnegie Mellon University, and at the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol, England. Subsequent to training with the BOVTS, he taught acting and directed theater at East End London's, Hoxton Hall. In 1966, he joined International Voluntary Services and taught English and drama to Vietnamese high school students in Quang Tri, Danang, and Hoi An, Vietnam. Upon completion of his service, he toured for two years with Harvey Grossman's mime-based theater, the Players' Theater of New England, performing featured roles in The Devil and Daniel Webster, A Christmas Carol, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. From 1970-1974, he worked again in Southeast Asia as a visiting professor at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand where he taught acting and directing and produced major American plays in Thai translation including Thai premieres of Death of a Salesman, Streetcar Named Desire and Ah, Wilderness. Returning to the United States, he performed with major regional theaters across the country including the Garrett County Playhouse in Maryland, the Classic's Theater Company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Michigan State's Performing Arts Company. He holds an M.A. in Speech Communication from the University of New Mexico and a Ph.D. in Asian and Western Theater from Michigan State University. He has written and published on the Thai popular theater form, Likay, which he researched through an award from the Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Program. Dr. Carkin's recent work focuses on the relationship between the teaching of drama, language, and culture. His culture studies book, How to Succeed in the USA, was recently published in Taiwan ( in English and Mandarin) by Discovery Publishers and in Thailand (in English with Thai translation) by Se-Education Publishers. He continues to act professionally and currently teaches in the Intensive English Program as well as Methods of Second Language Acquisition and Pronunciation Techniques in the graduate TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) program at the Institute for Language Education, Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, New Hampshire. His plays, as featured here, have been used in hundreds of classrooms around the world, and he is a frequent presenter at regional, national, and international TESOL conferences on his specialty: teaching English through drama. He is head moderator of the international online drama in language teaching forum, TESOL-Drama, and leads the annual six-week Electronic Village Online TESOL-Drama forum, EVO-Drama. His latest publication is the monograph, Teaching English through Drama: The State of the Art, also available through Carlisle Publications.

Catherine-Ann Day has over thirty years of English teaching experience. This includes six years of high school English and Latin at Memorial High School, Manchester, NH, where she was also Director of Dramatics, selecting, casting, directing, and staging productions and pageants. For over ten years, she worked mornings/evenings in The Manchester Adult Learning Center, teaching Adult Basic Education, GED, and ESL classes and for one year, coordinated the Hillsborough County Adult (Literacy) Tutorial Program. As an Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department at NH Vocational Technical College, Manchester, NH, she taught English to LPN candidates. For sixteen years, she was an ESL instructor in the American Language and Culture Center (now, the Institute for Language Education) at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, NH, teaching international students of various levels of English proficiency and producing materials for all levels of ESL classes in the intensive English program. She has a BA in English from Mount St. Mary's College (1964), and an MA in English from Middlebury College (1969). At Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College VT, she focused on courses in literature and drama and acted in several productions. She has a CAGS in Teaching of English as a Second Language from Boston University (1985). Retired from New Hampshire College as an Associate Professor of English, she continues to create ESL curriculum materials for publication.

Work for Ten Plays for the ESL/EFL Classroom grew out of the combined expertise of Catherine-Ann Day, who devised the comprehension and vocabulary questions, the crossword puzzles and the follow up activities, Denis Hall, who created the Cultural Notes for Discussion: Before and After the Readings, and Gary Carkin, who wrote the plays.

Denis A. Hall has been an ESL/EFL teacher for over twenty-five years, having taught in both the United States and Japan. He holds a B.A. in Spanish and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics, both from the University of New Hampshire. As a graduate student, he taught Freshman Writing for both international and native speaking students, as well as courses in the Intensive Summer Program in English at the university. He spent two years (1980-1982) teaching English at Mukogawa Women's University in Nishinomiya, Japan, as well as at the Japan Institute for International Studies, the Asahi Culture Center in Osaka, and Showa Sangyo, Inc. in Kobe.

After serving as a teaching fellow at Harvard University in the Summer Intensive English Language Program (1982), he began teaching at the Institute for Language Education of Southern New Hampshire University. In the twenty-two years he has been at CLE, he has served as Coordinator of the Intensive English Program, Coordinator of the international sections of English 101 (a basic writing course), Tutorial Coordinator for undergraduate students, and Acting Director. Having taught in all levels of the intensive English program, he currently teaches a bridge course for undergraduate students and advises all the students in the program. He also advises IEP students taking undergraduate classes. On the graduate level, he teaches courses in descriptive linguistics, language acquisition, and sociocultural factors affecting language learning. He also supervises the teaching practica of master's candidates in the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) program.

Prof. Hall has also tutored extensively, both privately and for companies (e.g., Osram Sylvania in Manchester, NH). In addition, he served as thesis advisor for students in the former Community and Economic Development Program at New Hampshire College and at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, VT.

Prof. Hall served for twelve years on the Executive Board of Northern New England TESOL, the regional affiliate of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), He has attended and presented at both international and regional conferences. His main interests are in the areas of teaching writing, grammar, and applied linguistics.

Carlisle Publications welcomes you to the world of ESL/EFL drama.

We are dedicated to producing evocative dramatic materials that can be used in developing reading, speaking, listening, and writing skills in a creative way. We look forward to serving your classroom needs with material that we have already developed. But we would like to hear from YOU also. What would you like to see us develop in the way of materials that will teach language and at the same time allow students to be creative? Tell us about your needs. Contact: GaryCarkin@yahoo.com

Carlisle Publications

www.CarlislePublications.com