My areas of specialization and research are: applied linguistics, English communication, curriculum and materials development, English media literacy skills, and English in popular global culture.
I'm particularly interested in morphology (how words are formed), etymology (the origin, development and history of words) and collocation (how words are combined naturally). I'm also interested in pragmatics (the study of what we really mean when we communicate) and media literacy (learning how to understand and interpret media messages).
My current research topics (2020~) include teaching controversial issues, developing a media literacy course for university students in Japan, the study of the cultural impact and the resurgence of ‘slow media’ and a Grant-in Aid for Scientific Research project as co-researcher in the creation of a Japanese- English parallel corpus to develop search software for use in the classroom or at home and for the creation of dictionaries (日本人中高生のための英語表現コーパスの構築とその活用 2019-04-01 – 2022-03-31: project area number: 19K00771).
In the Department of Liberal Arts at Tamagawa University, Tokyo, I teach various courses. These are, Presentation Skills in English (a course that teaches how to make different types of presentations in English), Academic Communication (a course that teaches how to participate successfully in an academic debate on important global issues), Issues in Japanese Studies (a comparative research course whose aim is to establish where Japan stands on political, social and ethical issues in a global context) and 2 English Media Literacy seminars where we access various media sources, understand and evaluate media messages, interpret the messages and respond to them often by creating our own media.
I have spent over 25 years developing curricula and materials for many organisations. I have created numerous materials for NHK (from 2012 to 2015 I was the creator and author of the NHK radio texts “Kiso Eigo” 2 and 3) and also for other organisations and publishers including BBC, Asahi press, Kirihara Shoten, Longman, Gakken, Sanrio, Mezzo Piano, Poplar, Gakko Tosho and Marubeni Corp. among others.
My message to our students is: learn how to hone your critical thinking skills, always look at every issue from a variety of perspectives, and, as Einstein once famously said, “…never stop questioning.”