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About me...So, uh, are you a little curious about um the guy who created theeee Filled Pause Research Center? Well, here is a brief self-introduction. Having come from a long line of teachers (father: university professor; mother: grade-school teacher; both grandfathers: preachers--which is basically the same thing as a teacher only more serious) it was inevitable that I, too, became a teacher. After graduating from Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL) in 1988 I came to Hiroshima City on the Ministry of Education's Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program and taught at a public high school for two years. I then moved to ECC Institute of Foreign Languages, a private language school, and also took on several part-time jobs including teaching English at the Red Cross Nursing Hospital, YMCA Day Care Center, and Notre Dame Seishin Junior College. In 1994, Notre Dame Seishin hired me as a full-time faculty member and I have been there since. I am, along with colleague Sandra Williams, responsible for the oral English language program as well as second-year composition classes. These last two years I have also been working on an MA in TEFL through the University of Birmingham's (England) Distance Learning program for which my dissertation is the final work. After I finish this program (in March, 1998) I plan to spend more time with my family (wife and four-year-old son) as well as continue my study of filled pauses and other fields of interest (video in ELT, CALL, and Visual Basic programming) |
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