Together again: Diane (seated, far left) visiting the classroom in Tawau, where she used to teach. With her are her former students, and the school’s current cohort and their teachers.
The Peace Corps programme which was established in 1961 by the United States government was intended to train volunteers to provide international development assistance. In 1962, the first Peace Corps volunteer group of 36 young Americans arrived in Kuala Lumpur to work in the villages and towns throughout Malaya.
Among them were schoolteachers, including my good friend Diane Larsen Freeman, who brought their knowledge and skills to our early Malaysian classrooms and very quickly became part of the nation’s education history, forming bonds with their Malaysian colleagues, students and community.
A renowned American linguist, Diane began her career as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in Tawau, Sabah, from 1967 to 1969.
According to Diane, this was the beginning of her “fascination with language acquisition”.
To many English language teachers and students in Malaysia and abroad, the name “Diane Larsen Freeman” is synonymous with second language acquisition and her books are used as major texts in many Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) curriculums.
Diane’s Methodology tapes had such a great impact on my students, that they pleaded to see her in person. So, in 2002, I invited Diane to the Malaysia International Conference on English Language Teaching. She was visibly emotional when she shared how her hectic schedule did not allow her to visit her former students in Tawau.
Goodbye, Tawau: Diane (fourth from right) posing for a photo with her students before boarding the plane back to the US.
My conversations with her confirmed many things about Peace Corps volunteers – particularly about how they were at the core an entire resource for teaching.
Diane recalled how as a child, she would teach her siblings using the small blackboard fitted onto the back of her bedroom door. When the then president, John F. Kennedy, called out to Americans to serve the country abroad, she knew it was time to realise her calling to be an educator.
Diane had studied Spanish and after graduation, she had hoped of a Peace Corps posting in South America but she was sent to the other side of the world. She had a Malaysia posting!
Her students initially told her she was teaching them “American rather than English”, not realising at that time that she had enriched their world with cultural and language nuances, such as an elevator as opposed to a lift, and the differences between a truck and a lorry, and a cookie versus a biscuit.
But she soon won them over and convinced them of the value in diversity.
Diane also doubled up as her students’ swim instructor during co-curricular activities and was able to bond with the community quickly.
Her homesickness evaporated despite the lack of smartphones and the Internet, and she was happy with the weekly aerogramme correspondence with her mother.
Two years in Tawau flew by. Diane finished her term as a Peace Corps volunteer and returned to the US to start her postgraduate studies.
Crediting her stint in Sabah for helping launch her international career as a distinguished scholar, Diane said the idea to study second language acquisition germinated during her Peace Corps days.
Now a professor and director of the famed English Language Institute at the University of Michigan, she is also one of the main contributors to second language acquisition research in the world.
Diane still remembers the day she left Tawau in 1969. Her students, all 30 of them, had come to the airport in their best attire to send her off.
On June 29, 2019, Diane was back in Malaysia to receive the Malaysia Outstanding Teacher Award at the International Conference on Creative Teaching, Assessment and Research in the English Language, and was given an all-paid holiday to Tawau to meet her students.
Her former students, who had been with her all those years ago on the tarmac of the Tawau airport, had a packed itinerary waiting for her. This Peace Corps volunteer found a way to bring the entire class back together again. Once a teacher, always their teacher. Nothing would ever change that, at least not for Diane.
Prof Jayakaran Mukundan Alumnus
Institute of International Education (IIE)
