Conference Chair
Dr. James A. Elwood is a professor of English in the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Mathematical Sciences at Meiji University in Tokyo. Originally from the United States, he has been in EFL education in Japan for 30 years and holds a doctorate in TESOL from Temple University.
In addition to his teaching at Meiji University, he is employed as an adjunct professor at several other universities in the Tokyo metropolitan area. His current courses include oral communication, paragraph writing, reading, graduate-level academic writing, psycholinguistics, presentation skills, and dissertation writing.
He has also taught intercultural understanding, TESOL methods, psychometric assessment, technology in education, and curriculum development. At present, he is advising three doctoral candidates in applied linguistics.
His research interests psychometric assessment, the use of technology in EFL education, corpus analysis, academic writing, and the development of international posture. Recent work has centered on longitudinal structural equation modeling, of which one instance will be presented at LISD 2020 in Oxford. His work has appeared in System, Computers and Education, JALT Journal, and in several edited volumes.
He is also active in international education, serving as a deputy director of the International Student Office at Meiji University and soon will become an assistant director of the International Collaboration Office at Meiji University. In the former position, he works with international students and travels frequently to publicize the university and maintain and develop inter-university exchange agreements.
Finally, he is active in the EFL field in Japan and abroad. He has served as the editor of the OTB Forum (a small academic journal), a textbook development adviser, a reviewer for several academic journals, and a contributor to an English language teaching magazine. He also serves as a consultant to Class2Class, an online language-learning, and academic collaboration platform.
A more detailed list of his research activity is available at http://www.jimelwood.net/research/research.html