I came to Japan in 1985, at twenty-three, as an assistant language teacher in the Monbusho English Fellows Program. I was from New Jersey, had no money, no connections, and no training as a teacher — which was the point. The program wanted young Americans who would work alongside experienced Japanese teachers rather than tell them what to do.

In my first months I visited a different junior high school almost every day. At one of them, a boy was called on to ask me a question in English. He was terrified. He managed it — a real question, in a real language, to a real person, probably for the first time in his life — and his teacher cut in immediately to correct his pronunciation in front of thirty classmates. He sat down. I remember thinking he would probably never willingly speak English again.

A few days later, at another school, a boy asked me the same question. I answered him before anyone could correct him. He smiled, relaxed, and answered mine. Forty years later, that's the problem I'm still working to solve.

The rest followed from there. I stayed. In 1987 I was elected the first National Chairman of the JET Program. I took my master's and doctorate at Temple University Japan under Paul Nation, writing first on how far above the level of the learners Japanese textbooks were in terms of vocabulary load, and then on what makes vocabulary stick. Somewhere in a Temple classroom in 1994 I ran into the question that has occupied me ever since: which words matter most, and how does anyone actually learn them?

I'm a tenured professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Meiji Gakuin University, where I created the EFL teacher education program and for several years directed the MA and PhD programs. Since 2020 I've worked as an English Language Specialist for the U.S. State Department, running teacher training in Georgia, Ukraine, Israel, and Turkey. I've published research, given more than a hundred keynote and plenary addresses, and done two TEDx talks. My full CV is here.

But I've always thought of myself as an applied linguist rather than an ivory tower scholar. Every word list, tool, assessment, and training program I build has to work in an actual classroom, for actual learners, or it isn't worth building.

That's also why the NGSL Project is free. The people who most need good vocabulary research — learners in underfunded schools, teachers with no professional development budget, adults studying on their own — are the least able to pay for it. Putting the foundation behind a paywall would mean the only people it reaches are the ones who could already afford a good education. Research that stays in journals isn't applied linguistics. It's just research.

So the foundation stays free, and what gets built on top of it — by publishers, by companies, by me — is a separate question. That's how it was designed.

If you're building something and think I can help, I'd like to hear about it.