I’m originally from New Jersey, but I’ve now lived in Japan far longer than I have ever lived in the U.S. I graduated from Brown University (Rhode Island, America’s smallest state) and then got my Master’s degree and Ph.D. degree from the University of Hawaii. All of my degrees are in “Linguistics.”

I’m retired now, but I taught at Kyoto Sangyo University as a member of the English Department. I taught English majors there, but I was also the Chair of the General English Program for the university where 3000 first-year students study English either 2 or 4 times/week.

I’ve got a very small family. Naoko, my wife, was an English teacher for Panasonic but now spends much of her time doing aerobics and dancing, particularly Salsa. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of good male Salsa dancers in Japan, so she often goes abroad to “salsa congresses” in order to find good partners. Tom, doesn’t dance!

We live in Hirakata, Osaka Prefecture. We had two dogs, Pixie, the bigger one and Leilani, but they both went to Doggie Heaven in the early part of 1999, having been 18 and 16 years old, respectively, when they passed away.

As will become obvious from these pages, my main interest lies in uses of technology for better language learning. My current project MReader which is helping many students around the world master English in a pleasant way — reading books. There are approximately 100,000 student users as of 2019.

I am also heavily involved with the Extensive Reading Foundation, of which I am the Chair. Another ‘hat’ that I currently wear is Editor of “Teaching English as a Second Language Electronic Journal” (TESL-EJ).

Some of my picture collection on Picasa.

Tom’s blog entitled “The Incursion of English into Japanese“. Comments welcome!