|
 < back to authors list Kathy Heilenman:
Although writing a textbook wasn't required or overly encouraged at Northwestern University, where the first edition originated, Heilenman said she and her co-authors wrote Voila! because they really wanted to change the way French was taught.The the most effective way to do this, they figured, was through a textbook. "We thought at least if we wouldn't get rewarded in the university setting, we'd get rewarded in the marketplace," Heilenman said. Once they got started and saw how much work was involved in relation to the monetary value, their opinions changed: "We realized that we will still be doing something good, but we'd have to benefit more indirectly." Heilenman, currently an associate professor of French and Italian at the University of Iowa, said she won't write a textbook again:"There's no motivation for me to do it besides doing good work and there's no other topic I have enough expertise in to write about in any event. I would rather stick to doing research and writing articles." French is a relatively small market, she said: "If I were writing in another, larger market, my conclusion might well have been different." Heilenman is also director of first-year and second-year language instruction at the University of Iowa. She studies foreign language education and second language acquistion, the psychology and linguistics behind how people acquire a second language. She is currently trying to launch a new interdisciplinary graduate program in second language acquisition. Heilenman says she enjoys teaching and administrative work: "If I had to do only one it would be depressing." The most rewarding thing about teaching, she said, is helping students make sense of things: "It's satisfying to see people figure out they can learn another language." "I kind of fell into studying French," she said. "I took Latin in high school, but got sick of it, so I took French in college." She got facinated by languages and, later, in graduate school, she discovered second language acquistion, which she now spends much of her time researching. She has written several articles on the subject including "Changes in sentence processing as second language proficiency increases," published in Cognitive Processing in Bilinguals in 1992 and "Processing strategies in L2 learners of French: The role of transfer" in Language Learning in 1993. "I write whenever I have time," said Heilenman. "I write by grabbing time whenever I have it." After writing Voila!, she says, she won't be doing it again. "Finishing the text was almost anticlimatic," she said. "We had spent so much time on formatting, proofreading and editing, that by the time the book came out, all I could feel was glad it was over with." Heilenman gives beginning authors this advice: Do an awful lot of research, join Text and Academic Authors, talk to lawyers and other authors, and read what's already been written. "Find out what you're getting into before you do it," she said. When Heilenman isn't teaching French, she's training dogs. She has three Bouvier des Flandres dogs named Jeannee, Kaz and Nelly. The 60-90 pound dogs are black and hairy. "They look like bears," she said. She trains them to herd cows, sheep and goats for farms. "I train dogs as a hobby." Heilenman said. "It's my social life to get away from the university." She is married to Daniel S. O'Leary and has one daughter, Lisa Graft. — reported by Kim Pawlak, 1998 |
