Dr. Glenn Toh, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Sophia University Yotsuya campus, Central Library, Room L821 ,

▶Access Gide

English

Not required. Admission free.

Dr. Glenn Toh was Director of the Academic English Program at Tama University and Deputy Head of the Center for English as a Lingua Franca at Tamagawa University before taking up his present position in the Language and Communication Centre at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Dr.  Toh has taught English in various locations in the Asia Pacific, including Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore. His research focuses on critical pedagogy, exploring themes such as English as a medium of instruction in higher education, English language education in Japan and children’s education in cross-border marriages. Dr. Toh has written five monographs published by Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan and numerous articles appearing in international journals such as Asian Englishes, World Englishes, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and Journal of English as a Lingua Franca.

In this talk, Dr. Toh provides a critically and reflexively historicized account of the production of two recently published book chapters that have as their background setting the East Asian nation of Japan. These book chapters concern particularly interesting, but extremely challenging, undertakings, etched and documented in print because publishers and editors wish to have their stories told. One book chapter relates to English Medium Instruction in a Japanese university (Toh & Zion, 2025), and the other, to the teaching of English as a Lingua Franca (Toh & McBride, 2025). By way of examining the gestational histories of the production and development of these two book chapters, Dr. Toh attempts to reflect on the challenges of English teaching as a whole, and those of English teaching in a location like Japan in particular.

Sophia Linguistic  Institute for International Communication (SOLIFIC)