About

The methodology behind this practice didn't come from a textbook. It developed through two decades of learning and teaching across four countries, in multiple educational systems.

From 1992 to 1997, I taught at Minoh Free Academy, a private K-12 academy in Japan. I was the first foreign teacher ever offered tenure, a reflection not just of time served but of demonstrated results across age groups and academic levels. During that period I also conceived, developed, and grew the school's first study abroad program, taking it from twelve students in its first year to fifty-one students and teachers in its second. Building something from nothing, inside an institution whose language and culture were not my own, shaped how I think about what rigorous instruction actually requires.

From 2001 to 2005 I taught across three universities in China. At Wenzhou University I became the first westerner in the institution's history to teach Japanese to Chinese undergraduates. At Shaoxing Foreign Language College I developed and led the college's first teacher-training course for English lecturers, teaching other teachers how to teach. These years produced a working understanding of how students from other cultural and educational backgrounds encounter English academic writing, and where the specific friction points tend to appear.

My graduate training at the School for International Training gave this experience a rigorous analytical framework. The program is known for treating language acquisition as a serious intellectual discipline rather than a set of rules to be transmitted. Coursework included language acquisition theory, sociolinguistics, cross-cultural pedagogy, and language analysis. I completed internships at the University of Veracruz in Mexico and through Vermont's interactive television teaching system, simultaneously instructing students at two separate locations. The program's orientation was deliberately non-standard: the goal was understanding how language actually works, not how institutions typically teach it.

My own language learning runs alongside this teaching history. My Japanese is near-native, developed through six-and-a-half years of full immersion in Japan. My Chinese is largely self-taught, deepened through formal study at Shanghai Normal University, where coursework included Chinese etymology, the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language, and Wu Chinese (Shanghainese), a linguistically distinct variety that even most Mandarin speakers cannot follow.

These diverse language learning experiences bring my graduate training in language acquisition to life. Language is not just how we communicate thought. It is the mechanical foundation for thought itself, the very architecture of how our brains structure ideas. Every language I have learned, every classroom I have taught in, has deepened my understanding of how precise and rigorous thinking gets built, and how to build it deliberately in every student.