僾儘僼傿乕儖

My name is Adrian Paterson. I was born and raised in New Zealand, except for four years in England as a child. New Zealand is a bit like Japan in some ways; it is an island country in the Pacific Ocean that sits on a tectonic plate boundary, so it also has volcanoes and earthquakes. It also has many beautiful mountains and forests. But, it is also different in many ways; it has the indigenous Maori people who arrived in New Zealand about 800 years ago, and European settlers (mostly British) who began arriving about 170 years ago, so it has a very unique and diverse mix of culture.

To be honest, in high school, I did not do so well in my English classes, which is New Zealand's kokugo, but I really enjoyed reading. Later, I worked in a company and part of my job was training new employees in our department, which I really enjoyed. During this time, I became more interested in English literature and the history of the English language, and so I decided to go to university to study English and become an English teacher. After I finished my undergraduate degree and a graduate Diploma in TESOL, I got the opportunity to come to Japan and study in the graduate school at Osaka University of Foreign Studies, where I received a masters degree.

My general area of research is applied linguistics, with special focus on vocabulary acquisition, language testing, and language as a complex adaptive system. I first became interested in vocabulary acquisition when I was studying in the Diploma TESOL course, and through that research I found that I needed to know more about testing, which I studied and became very interested in. For many years I felt that linguistics did not offer a complete explanation of language, because there were many gaps between the different fields of research within linguistics. So I was very excited when I first read about complexity theory and how it offers a more holistic approach to researching language, and I am now trying to learn more about it and to understand it better.

I have been teaching English in Japan for more than 15 years. I teach academic English, presentation, language and culture, English communication, vocabulary and testing, and pronunciation. I enjoy teaching my classes, especially classes where I teach using content based methods. I feel that I have been very lucky to be able to pursue a career that allows me to follow to my interests, and I look forward to passing this on to a new generation of English teachers.