James D. Brown ("JD") is Professor of SLS at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His areas of specialization include language testing, curriculum design, program evaluation, and research methods. He was educated at California State University Los Angeles (BA French), University of California Santa Barbara (BA English Literature), and University of California Los Angeles (MA TESL and PhD in Applied Linguistics). Dr. Brown has served on the editorial boards of the TESOL Quarterly, Language Testing, Language Learning and Technology, RELC Journal, and JALT Journal, as well as on the TOEFL Research Committee, the TESOL Advisory Committee on Research, and the Executive Board of TESOL.

Graham Crookes is Associate Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii. He received his doctorate from the University of Hawaii, in Educational Psychology, specializing in the area of second language learning. Before joining the Department of SLS, he was Assistant Director of the Center for Second Language Classroom Research at the University of Hawaii. He began his career in second language education in 1977, and has since taught mainly in the Pacific area, spending several years in Malaysia and Japan before coming to Hawaii. Dr. Crookes has published in such journals as TESOL Quarterly and Applied Linguistics, and his current research interests include teacher-research and critical pedagogy.

Richard R. Day is a Professor of SLA at the University of Hawaii. His instructional and research interests are in second language teacher education, reading, literature, and materials development. He has presented his work at major conferences in Canada, Asia, and the United States. The author of numerous articles and books, his most recent publications include Extensive Reading Activities in the Second Language Classroom (with Julian Bamford, Cambridge University Press) and Impact Issues and Impact Topics (both with Junko Yamanaka, Longman Asia).

Sandra McKay is a Professor of English at San Francisco State University where she teaches courses in sociolinguistics, methods, and materials for graduate students in TESOL. Her books include Teaching English as an International Language: Rethinking Goals and Approaches (2002, Oxford University Press, winner of the Ben Warren International Book Award), New Immigrants in the US: Readings for Second Language Educators (edited with Sau-ling Wong, 2000, Cambridge University Press) and Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching (edited with Nancy Hornberger, 1996, Cambridge University Press). Her research interests in English as an international language developed from her extensive work in international teacher education in countries such as Chile, Hong Kong, Hungary, Latvia, Morocco, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand. She recently completed a research methodology text for Lawrence Erlbaum Associates entitled Researching Second Language Classrooms.

Richard W. Schmidt is a professor and former chair of the Department of SLS at the University of Hawaii, where he has been teaching since 1976 in both the M.A. program in ESL and the Ph.D program in SLA. He is also National Foriegn Language Resource Center director at the University and American Association for Applied Linguistics president-elect. He is the author of many journal articles and editor of three books in the area of social and psychological factors in second and foriegn language learning. He is also co-author of the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (3rd Edition, 2002).

Dina R. Yoshimi is an Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She received her B.A. in Linguistics at Yale University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Southern California. Prior to taking a position at the university of Hawaii-Manoa, Dr. Yoshimi taught English as a Second Language in the People’s Republic of China and English Composition at the University of Southern California. Her commit to increasing cross-cultural communication between the United States and Asia has led her to explore the sociocultural patters of interaction in settings of higher education in the U.S. and Japan, and, over the past decade, to developing innovative instructional approaches to classroom foreign language instruction of conversation interaction and sociocultural awareness.