CURRICULUM VITAE
CONTACT INFORMATION
Name: Gregory John Matheson
Address: Language Center
National United University
1, Lienda, Miaoli 36003, Taiwan, R.O.C
Telephone: 037-381290
Email: drbean@freeshell.org, greg@nuu.edu.tw
Homepage: http://drbean.freeshell.org
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Date of Birth: January 29, 1949
Place of Birth: Sydney, Australia
Citizenship: Australian
Alien Resident Certificate: KC00125148
Registered MOE Lecturer (JiangShi): 056372
Sex: Male
SUMMARY STATEMENT
A dedicated, experienced, effective EFL teacher
EDUCATION
Troy State University, Seoul, Korea (Troy, Alabama, USA)
MS in Educational Leadership
1993-1995
University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia
PhD Program. (I don't have PhD. I did not submit thesis.)
1970-1972
University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales
BA (Psychology)
1966-1969
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Berlitz, Osaka, Japan
English Conversation Teacher (1981-1982)
Teaching dialog preparation
Talk-In, Kobe, Japan
English Conversation Teacher (1983-1985)
Teaching methodology, teaching dialog preparation
The Korea Times, Seoul, Korea
Copy Editor (1986-1996)
Non-native speaker writing editing,
including news, editorials, opinion
Appreciation/understanding of Korean
political/cultural developments
Hyundai, Samsung, Kolon, and others, Seoul, Korea
Part-time Business English Teacher (1987-1996)
Understanding of basic business concepts
Development/choice of language materials
Korea Trade Promotion Corporation Academy, Seoul, Korea
English for International Trade (c.1992)
Course development
Soonchunhyang University, Asan, Korea
English Department
Listening, Composition and Conversation (1997-1998)
Course/Materials development
Chinmin Institute of Technology, Toufen, Taiwan
Applied Foreign Languages Department
Composition, Conversation, Business English (1999-2008)
Course/Materials development
National United University, Miaoli, Taiwan
Language Center
Intercultural communication, Pop culture, Media,
Composition, Conversation, Business English (2008-2012)
Course/Materials development
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
Korea TESOL (1986-1998)
Seoul Chapter President (1992-1996)
Organization of monthly meetings
Informal teacher training development
Preparation of monthly newsletter
Development of teacher meeting procedures (eg concurrent sessions)
During my tenure, meetings tripled in size
Participation in Tom Farrell's PhD Research (1995)
A qualitative study on the reflections of 4 EFL teachers in Korea
Indiana University of Pennsylvania, http://tesl-ej.org/ej14/a1.html
Observation/Discussion of my teaching
Participation in Teacher Development Group
Korea TESOL Teacher Development & Education SIG
Co-founder/co-leader (1997-1998)
With Barbara Wright
Development of SIG philosophy
Organization of meetings
ETA-ROC
Member (1999-2003)
The conferences were theory-oriented, rather than
practice-oriented. It is true there is nothing as practical as
a good theory. But the corollary of this is that there is
nothing as good as a practical theory. I decided to withdraw
and become a competent computer programmer.
Taipei Perl Mongers
Member (2004-to date)
Open-source perl programmers' organization
PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS
Language Skills
Japanese, Advanced
Korean, Intermediate
Chinese, Basic
Computer Skills
Perl language, intermediate
Haskell language, basic
Linux system administration
Web programming
Web, mail server administration
Natural Language Processing Certificate
March - May, 2012
Jurafsky and Manning (Stanford)
Grade 84.3
Testing Skills
GRE scores (1992)
| Analytical | 710 | (top 10 percent)
|
| Quantitative | 780 | (top 7 percent)
|
| Verbal | 780 | (top 1 percent)
|
PROFESSIONAL INTERNET ACTIVITY
Metaphors in Language Teaching Mailing List (1997-98)
metaphor@asan.sch.ac.kr
Administrator/Founder
The list was destroyed by conflict between CLT teachers taking
a Lakoff&Johnson line and non-mainstreamers supporting literary
theories of metaphor.
Chaos & Complexity Theory in SLA Mailing List (1997-to date)
chaosla@asan.sch.ac.kr (1997-1998)
Co-Administrator/Co-Founder (1997-1998)
This list continues intermittently under the
co-administrator/co-founder, Charles Adamson, in Japan.
Taiwan Teachers Mailing List (1999)
ttl@ms.chinmin.edu.tw (1999)
Administrator/Founder (1999)
The list was destroyed as membership reached 80 after the
computer center wiped the mail server's file system.
TEACHER-USEFUL PROGRAMMING PROJECTS
Taiwan Penpals Site (2000-2001) penpals@ms.chinmin.edu.tw
Computer-aided penpal matching was implemented. After
matching, all mail between penpals at Chinmin and their
partners in the US, Korea, Australia and Japan was routed
through the penpal email address, allowing archiving of
messages.
Email-Delivered Testing (2002-2003)
A pilot project to deliver cooperative learning test
questions in a composition class by email and grade them
automatically on their return by the students was completed.
The project was not pursued. The burden that the e-learning
workload places on the teacher of unmotivated learners
convinced me to pursue non-email related forms of
teacher-useful programming.
Cooperative Jigsaw Activity Testing Site (2004)
After face-to-face discussion of information owned by each of
the individual members, group understanding was tested
by completion of an Internet-delivered multiple-choice test.
Computerization allowed instantaneous feedback on group
performance.
Cloze Dictation (2004-2006)
Dictation, a low-level, communicative activity for
unmotivated learners, was combined with cloze, giving the
it motivating, puzzle-like features. Programs were developed
to parse arbitrary text and automatically generate arbitrary
clozed text configurations. Many different variations have
been tried as class, homework and test activities. In
particular, pair dictations of dialogue text are being used
in exams.
Competition Systems (2005-2011)
Round-robin and swiss tournament pairing and grading systems.
Principled pairing of students for pair activities so each
works with a cross-section of the class and with partners of
the same level.
Cloze Dictation Web Application (2007-to date)
The puzzle-like features of my cloze dictation systems were
enhanced by translation to the Web via CGI, allowing the
students feedback on their answers in real-time. This
application proved very popular. The students were able
to listen to authentic native-speaker sound files
and fill in the blanks in the outline transcriptions.
Because students may be able to do this with limited
understanding of text meaning, the application's latest
feature is comprehension questions to test understanding of
the text. Words in the questions are only shown if the
player has transcribed them correctly where they appear in
the listening passage. Given the choice of answering the
questions or filling in the blanks, answering the questions
also proved popular.
Grading Framework (2008-to date)
Teachers usually rely on spreadsheets like Excel to
organize and report the grades of their students. This
means all the data is in a monolithic, hard-to-access
database. My Grades system is distributed with the data in
ordinary computer files. (Almost) all the data that
students provide, from individual answers on individual
exam questions, to number of letters typed correctly into
cloze passages in homework, is directly accessible. The
Grades system crunches all this data into final grades,
but also allows students to access their grade standing via
the Web throughout the semester.
Question-answering system (2011-to date)
My question-answering system allows students to ask
questions about stories they have listened to and to get
answers to those questions. The grammar is quite
limited--no pronouns, passives or perfect/continuous
tenses--but relative clauses, WH and YN questions and
be-copula constructions ARE parsed. The students have to
write grammatical questions, and then the knowledge base
provides the answer. I am quite excited about this project.
It is not ground-breaking in terms of question answering
(see http://en.wikipedia/wiki/Question_answering), but
there is immense potential in the area of teaching grammar
and conversation in ESL.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
Korea TESOL National Conference, Fall 1996
Swapshops (with Troy Ottwell, Andrew Todd)
First Pan-Asian Conference, Bangkok, Thailand, January 1997
* Swapshops (with Troy Ottwell, Andrew Todd)
* Teacher Knowledge
Pusan KOTESOL Regional Conference, May 1997
Teaching metaphors
PUBLISHED SOFTWARE
Games::Tournament::RoundRobin
http://search.cpan.org/~drbean/Games-Tournament-RoundRobin-0.01
Kwiki::RenamePage
http://search.cpan.org/~drbean/Kwiki-RenamePage-0.01
Games::Tournament::Swiss
http://cpansearch.perl.org/~drbean/Games-Tournament-Swiss-0.04
Grades
http://cpansearch.perl.org/~drbean/Grades-0.12
NON PEER REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
Korea Times (1986-88)
Korean AETK/KOTESOL Newsletter (1988-1997)
The English Connection (KOTESOL) (1992-1998)
INTERESTS
Jogging, 6 kms in 1 hour
Pushups, 35
Cycling, Taichung-Toufen, 8 hours, August 2004
Summarized at ResumE, or Return to HomePage
