Brent earned his BA in TESOL (1990) from BYU-Hawaii and an MA in TESOL (1993) from BYU. After working full-time for BYU-Hawaii as an EIL Lecturer (1993-2000), he moved to Los Angeles, CA with his family where he earned his PhD in Applied Linguistics from UCLA (2007). Brent taught at BYU-Hawaii from 2003-2006 as an Assistant Professor of English Language Teaching and Learning while he was working on his dissertation. In 2006, he moved with his family to Utah to help raise his niece and four nephews together with his four kids. He worked at Salt Lake Community College (2006-2018) first as an Associate Professor in Developmental Education and then as an Associate Dean over ESL, Academic Readiness, and Testing. Brent returned to BYU-Hawaii as an Associate Professor of English Language Teaching and Learning in September 2018.
Brent’s professional interests include Language Assessment, TESOL Methodology, and Corpus-based learning. He has been a member of TESOL International since 1993 and has been a regular presenter at the annual conference. His most recent publications are “Teaching and assessing multi-word expressions using an open educational resources academic English corpus.” In E. Hinkel, (Ed.), Teaching Essential Units of Language: Beyond Single-word Vocabulary. New York, NY: Routledge (2018). “Corpora in language teaching.” In J. I. Liontas (Editor-in-Chief) The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching. Wiley-Blackwell (2018), and “Fundamental principles in content-based assessment (with M. Andrade).” In M. A. Snow & D. Brinton (Eds.), “The Content-based Classroom: New Perspectives on Integrating Language and Content. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (2017).
