Join us at the KOTESOL Membership Lounge Discord server for an AMA ("Ask Me Anything") with Dr. Amanda Gillis-Furutaka!
Amanda will be joining us from Japan on October 19 from 4-5 p.m. Feel free to ask questions in advance at the Membership Lounge (#ama-10-19-2020-amanda-gillis-furutaka) for Amanda to answer during the AMA.
The video of this AMA is available here.
About Our Guest
Professor Amanda Gillis-Furutaka has spent almost half her life in Japan, and most of those years she has been teaching and researching at Kyoto Sangyo University. Before arriving in Japan, however, she worked in many places around the world. After graduating from the French Department at the University of Exeter in the UK, she took her first EFL teaching job in a small coastal town in Portugal. She had so much fun (sailing and scuba diving in her free time) that she decided to make teaching English her career and returned to the UK for teacher training. Her next post was in China, teaching English to agricultural scientists at a college just outside Changsha, Hunan Province in southern China. This was from 1981–1982, when China was still following a strict Communist system but just starting to open up to foreigners. She returned to the U.K. by train (the Trans-Siberian Express) and then set off for more adventure, teaching in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for about 5 years. (It was very hard to leave....) After a very long detour through many South and Central American countries, she took up a teaching post in Kyoto, Japan. Kyoto has proven harder to leave than Rio!
She loves teaching and is a distance tutor for the Birmingham University MA distance courses in TESOL and applied linguistics. She did her PhD in music at the University of London Goldsmiths College and enjoys researching, especially useful topics such as bilingualism, international schools, intercultural studies, extensive reading, and many topics related to the brain, such as adolescence and old age, sleep, exercise, and of course, how the brain learns and how it responds to music. Her favorite way to spend a fine free day is hiking along mountain trails and then relaxing at home with her family and pet cats.
