I have one younger brother, who has three children and lives in Wales, and a younger sister, who lives with her husband and their three children
in the town of Bath, in southwest England. While I was working as a teacher in Japan, I met
my future wife in Kobe. We got married in Kobe, Japan, in 1982, and we
now live in Ikoma, Nara Prefecture. We have four children.
Academic Background: I have an M.A. in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford. I studied French and German in the Faculty
of Medieval and Modern Languages . That means I studied German and French language and literature, including Old French. I had to write 2 essays
each week about some French and German literature. I also had to translate
passages from English-French, French-English and German-English, English-German,
each week. At my university, lectures were in the morning and were optional.
No attendance was taken. Tutorials (seminars with 1-5 students) were in
the afternoon, in the professor's study. I had tutorials 4 times a week.
I lived in Keble
College.
Career: I started my career as an assistant teacher on the JET program in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, in 1980. I first taught in Kakogawa Higashi Prefectural High School for 1 year, then in Mukonoso
High School for 2 years. Then I moved to Tezukayama
University and have been there ever since. When I started working there, Tezukayama
had only 1 department, the Liberal Arts Department, and it was still a
women's college. At first I was a visiting teacher 客員講師, but
I became full-time in 1986 when the Economics Department was built, was
promoted to Associate Professor 助教授 in March 1991, and to Professor
in April, 2007.
Languages: English - fluent in reading, writing, speaking; Japanese - high intermediate
in speaking, intermediate in reading and low-intermediate in writing (2-kyu
in the Nihongo Noryoku Shiken 日本語能力試験２級、２００９年）; French - speaking, reading and writing to advanced level; German - low intermediate speaking, reading and writing. I also started to learn Italian and Russian when I was younger. I have always been interested in languages. When I was 7 years old I spent a year in Algeria, but I never learned to speak Arabic.
Hobbies: I came to Japan to learn Aikido, which I took up at university. I practised for 3 years in Japan, but
gave it up when I got married and had children. Later, I took up Karate
and have a green belt, but stopped practising after a knee injury. I would
like to take up Aikido again some day. I enjoy watching soccer, and surfing
the web, doing email, editing my homepage, and updating my various blogs. I sometimes enjoy writing and singing songs on the guitar with my colleague
Rodney Dunham. I taught myself the guitar when I was a university student.
I learned the piano when I was a child.
Working in Tezukayama: I have been teaching at Tezukayama
since 1983. I became full-time in 1986, and I became a professor in 2007.
I spent one year from April 1998 to March 1999 on sabbatical at Sussex University, studying Self-Access Centres and autonomous learning in EFL. At
Tezukayama, I am on various committees. You can see my present teaching
schedule here.