Overview
Nielson Sophann Hul was born in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge period and escaped to the United States of America when he was very young. After High School, he joined the U.S. Army and deployed during OIF/OEF as a Combat Medic. During his breaks in service, Nielson graduated from UCLA with a BA in English Literature and the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa with an MA in Linguistics.
He initially taught TESOL and English Composition at community colleges in California where he noticed that native Khmer-speaking students living in Long Beach, CA were taking both Foreign Language classes like French or Spanish in addition to struggling with English. As an additional obstacle, many could not read or write their native language, Khmer. With support from the Dean of Language Arts at Long Beach City College, Nielson designed and launched a Khmer language course intended to teach Reading and Writing the Khmer language to heritage learners in order to facilitate transfer to 4-year institutions for Khmer in the diaspora — a severely underrepresented group in higher education.
Since he began teaching heritage Khmer in 2014, he has moved on to teaching all levels of students at California State University, Long Beach; University of Wisconsin at Madison; and other institutions. He is currently working toward his PhD in Linguistics at Cornell with a focus on the acoustic phonetics of laryngeal sounds in Khmer.