Prof. Ray von Schmalz

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Ray von Schmalz, or Reinaldo von Schmalz, is a specialist in foreign language education, a lecturer at several universities both in Brazil and Canada, and an expert in Canadian history and culture. He is also a civil engineer and holds a master's degree in engineering.

Born in Brazil, and a German citizen, Ray von Schmalz had close Canadian friends during his teenage years and immigrated to Canada in the 1990’s, when he received a permanent resident status and the right to become a Canadian citizen, a status which he held until 2011. However, he opted not to acquire Canadian citizenship for personal reasons.

Upon his first return to Brazil in 1995, he founded the Canadian English Centre in 1995, fulfilling his old dream of creating the first centre for Canadian culture in Brazil. In 2005, he returned to Canada, where he was invited to give a lecture about his unique language education approach at a Canadian university, after which he was offered a teaching position there to open a pilot program using his method, but had to turn down the offer in order to complete the new Canadian English Centre project, which resulted in the new state-of-the-art school building, which he designed himself to meet the needs of his program, and a selected team of teachers, educators, educational technicians, and assistants, made up of Canadians, Americans and Brazilians.

Ray von Schmalz has done advanced scientific research into linguistics, delving into fields such as neurolinguistics, brain lateralization, interlingual phonetic and phonological transfer, sensory vocabulary acquisition, intonation pattern acquisition in adulthood, and so many other fields that his work has caught the eye of several prominent scholars both in Brazil and in Canada, mainly for the unique results his method has produced. His language research and phonetics data collection took him as far as Scotland and England in 2016.

In spite of his desire to return to Canada and share his research with a Canadian university, Ray von Schmalz continues his work in Brazil, to make sure that the Canadian English Centre continues to be the one school where Brazilian students can acquire proficiency in English in the shortest time frame, investing as little as possible.

In addition, Ray von Schmalz is also an award-winning multi-instrumentalist musician, singer, and composer, with a musical reputation in several locations in North American and Europe. Upon the release of his album “Shadows of the Past” in 2020, Ray von Schmalz was interviewed by a British music magazine and “Shadows of the Past” was the featured album in the popular “Unsigned” show on London’s ARfm in February of 2020, when two songs of the album, Road Across the USA and No Time were played during prime time, from 7 to 9 P.M., on a Friday, to the entire United Kingdom, and on the web to the world. Shadows of the Past has been played in several countries such as Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, to name but a few, and today it is available on the best music platforms such as Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, Deezer, among others. Ray von Schmalz has two YouTube channels, one for his original productions and one for covers, where he sings not only in English, but also in German, Portuguese, French, and Spanish.