Hello, and welcome to my homepage. This page is here to make available some information about myself and my interests. I'm a university professor and corporate trainer in Japan. I've also taught in the United States and China. For the whole story, take a look at my resume.
Currently, I am the director of the Tokyo Training Group. This group organizes training courses at various corporations in Tokyo. I also teach at Hosei University and Aoyama Gakuin University on a part-time basis.
My professional interests and activities fall into two main areas, the use of e-mail in language teaching and the promotion of vocabulary acquisition in language learners. I've posted some resources here relating to both of these topics.
E-Mail and Language Teaching
Interactive Use of E-mail
I gave this presentation at TESOL's 2000 Internet Fair, in Vancouver, Canada, on March 15, 2000. I demonstrated ways of using e-mail to teach English in any context, concentrating on strategies for replying electronically to student messages. I've posted the handout and example messages from that presentation.Using E-mail to Simulate Authentic Business Communication
I gave this presentation at the Third Asia-Pacific International Conference of the Association for Business Communication, which took place in Kyoto in August 2000. In my presentation, I talked about using e-mail in a Business English context. I've posted a summary of this presentation with some links to related web resources.
Vocabulary Resources
Vocabulary Resources for Materials Writers
This article appeared in the October, 1996 issue of The Materials Writers Newsletter, published by the JALT Materials Writers National Special Interest Group. It describes several word lists of interest to English teachers and their relationships to each other.
The General Service List
The General Service List (GSL) is a list of 2,000 words that was first published in 1953. These words were chosen to be the vocabulary basis of material for learners of English as a second language. A lot of teaching material, including graded readers, was produced based on this list. Until recently, this list was often used in research on second language acquisition, so it is frequently cited in journals. Nevertheless, the list is out of print and can be difficult to find. I have here more information about the GSL and the GSL itself.
The Academic Word List
The Academic Word List (AWL) was published in the Summer, 2000 issue of the TESOL Quarterly (v. 34, no. 2). It was devloped by Averil Coxhead, of Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. The AWL is a replacement for the University Word List (see below). The AWL is shorter than the UWL (570 words), and provides more coverage of academic texts. Click here for Averil Coxhead's Homepage and here for a downloadable version of the AWL.The University Word List
The University Word List (UWL) is a list of 808 words that do not occur on the GSL, but are common in academic texts. It was developed by Xue and Nation and first published in 1984. It has been replaced by the AWL (above). I'll leave this list on my site for now, but it is only of historical interest. Click here for more information about the UWL and here for the UWL itself.
Questions? Comments? Send me e-mail.