Self Introduction: Greetings and Salutations!  My name is Andrew Johnson.  I am married to a wonderful woman named Yumiko and we have a super little boy named Ren (born Oct 2005).  I spent the first 18 years of my life in the Washington, D.C. area.  After 7 years at Virginia Tech, I walked away with a Masters in Structural Engineering. A friend convinced me to try teaching English in Japan for a few years after graduating as a “break.”  Well, that was back in 1997 and since then teaching has become a rewarding career with lots of outlets for creativity. From 2002 to 2006, I taught English in the “Sciences and Engineering” Department of Ritsumeikan University in Shiga Prefecture and was exposed to CALL for the first time. Currently I am working at Sapporo Gakuin University in Hokkaido and am lucky enough to have access to excellent CALL facilities.

Teaching Philosophy:
I try not to get bogged down by the intricacies of my teaching philosophy; but rather let it serve as a guide.  The socio constructivist theory founded by Vygotsky appeals greatly to me.  This theory states that students master new approaches of learning through interacting with others and that it is impossible to separate learning from a social context.  The focus of language learning should not lie as the end objective but rather as the journey of learning itself.  For this reason, I feel students benefit more from process-oriented syllabuses (i.e. task-based, procedural) than product-oriented syllabuses (grammatical; notional-functional). I should say that I do believe that product-based activities such as grammar and vocabulary drills do play a role in learning and should not be disregarded.  Rather, they should be viewed as a stepping stone to interaction.

Research Interests:
I’m interested in interactive (database-driven) multimedia development.  In early 2006, I began developing a learning management system that allows teachers to create their own CALL courses with pedagogical-founded activities and take care of classroom administration.  I’m also interested in how computers and the Internet can best be utilized in non-CALL classrooms that have a single Internet connection and projector for the teacher’s laptop.