Darren is from New Brunswick, Canada and has taught in Kochi, Japan in a variety of contexts for 14 years. He is currently a Professor in the Department of International Studies at Kochi University where he teaches Intercultural Communication, Comparative Culture and English as a Foreign Language. Darren is presently involved in developing methods/materials for using authentic mediated spoken texts in the EFL classroom and classroom interaction research. Other projects include ongoing in-house curriculum development, content-based instruction and the development of gender studies materials for EFL learners. Darren is Senior Editor of the Asian EFL Journal, Associate Editor of JALT Journal and President of East Shikoku JALT (Japan Association of Language Teachers). He is an active presenter and contributor to various academic organizations in Japan and abroad.
Program Chair: Lawrie Hunter
Lawrie Hunter is a founding faculty member of Kochi University of Technology, where he supervises the critical thinking and academic writing programs. Since working as a mathematics educator in Canada, Australia and Papua New Guinea, he has been teaching English in Shikoku since 1990. He is co-author of Critical Thinking and author of Thinking in English (Thomson, in press). He was the founding president of the late Kochi Chapter of JALT, which has been reborn as the East Shikoku chapter. Motto: Language is just the paint on the house--what kind of house do you live
in?
Publicity Chair:
Takahiro Ioroi
Takahiro Ioroi is a Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Kochi Women's University. He started his teaching career at a high school in 1986. He joined KWU in 1994. He started his research activities in the theoretical study of English phonology and morphology. Over the past several years he has focused on the acquisition of the English word stress system by Japanese EFL learners. His interests also extend to the use of IT in linguistics (Corpus Linguistics) and education (CALL). Currently he teaches EFL, English linguistics/phonetics, teacher-training courses. He is also involved in the operation of the KWU general education EFL program.
Treasurer: Brett Milliner
Brett Milliner is from Brisbane, Australia. He has been teaching EFL in Kochi, Japan for the last 9 years. He is a part-time instructor at Kochi University and Kochi Women's University, where he teaches listening and oral communication. Brett is currently completing a Master of Applied Linguistics at the University of Southern Queensland. His research interests include language assessment and sociolinguistics. Brett also manages a variety of projects in Kochi to both support and raise awareness for the well-being of the prefecture's water systems and mountain environment.
Website Editor: Paul Daniels
Paul Daniels is from New England, USA and has been teaching EFL for nearly 18 years in Hawaii and Japan. He teaches at Kochi University of Technology in Japan where he designed and teaches a project-based science English lab for first year students. Paul is also the coordinator of the JALTCALL special interest group and is interested in developing mobile learning applications and Moodle CMS modules for language learning. His current research examines how technology can be used to reinforce project-based instructional models.
Membership Chair: David Grant
David Grant is Associate Professor of English at Kochi National College of Technology. He is originally from Pennsylvania and Colorado in the United States where he taught and worked as a photographer/ printmaker prior to coming to Japan. He has been teaching EFL in Kochi for the past eleven years. His current teaching and research interests are extensive reading and learning technologies employing task-based learning.