It’s an honor to be able to write about my pleasant experiences with Dave on this occasion. I met Dave when I first started working at Chubu University, Kasugai, Japan in 1990. I believe he also started working there in the same year as the Director of the OPELT Program, a semi-intensive extra-curricular program for those who want to study overseas at the graduate level. There were five native speakers of English in the program. Dave and I also team-taught some of the undergraduate students in the department of International Studies. It was really fun working closely with him on a daily basis.

We occasionally met each other in each other’s office and discussed a number of things. It was in this casual discussion where he got me interested in cross-cultural communication training. He taught me cross cultural understanding entails not only knowledge about foreign cultures, but also beliefs and feelings towards the foreign cultures. Eventually we offered cross cultural communication training workshops for those international students from overseas. One of the participants from Ohio University is now my colleague in English Department at Chubu. We also developed some cross cultural communication training materials, wrote booklets and papers and presented at conferences. It was really fun and intellectually stimulating to talk to Dave and I literally learned a lot from him. My main research area is still in culture in language teaching and I can honestly say that without Dave’s generous knowledge and wisdom sharing, I could not have been able to write papers and put a few books together in this area in the last decade or so.

Dave, I’d like to say thank you again for everything you taught me here at Chubu. If I had not met you here, I wouldn’t be so much interested in cross cultural components in language learning and teaching, and I wouldn’t have been able to produce much work in this field. As many people who have met you say, you have been my mentor and colleague I respect most and hope you will stay the same. Please keep helping and influencing young teachers and students in the same way as you helped us and please do take very good care of yourself.

Tadashi Shiozawa
Professor, Department of English Language and Culture
Graduate School of Languages and Culture
Chubu University
Kasugai, JAPAN

2012 ESL MiniConference Online