Kris Wright

Greetings classmates. I graduated with a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science and then worked for about 6 years as a software developer.

Then I moved to Japan to be an English Instructor and taught English via a video telecommunications multimedia interface called the Ginganet for 4.5 years. It was rewarding to help improve the lives of the students. Also, due to the nature of teaching over the Ginganet, I was able to interact with an incredible number of people. Each class was approximately three students and I had eight classes a day. This number (3 students times 8 classes a day) multiplied by 4.5 years equals the number of people I spoke with during that time, since I almost never had the same student for a second time (over 20,000 students). I did not originally plan on a career of English language teaching but with that number of students to interact with at all kinds of levels, I started to notice some students would have issues that other’s would not have, or some were attaining levels others were not, for different reasons at which I was interested to explore further. Underpinnings for these observations seemed to exist but I did not have the background in linguistics to explain well. Also, I have struggled with my own second language learning. In the end, I decided to go back to school at UTA to study the field more.

I work full time so I only take 2 classes a semester. My goal, at this point, is to return to language teaching and learning. Additionally, I really enjoyed 5301 when I took it a number of years ago and learned a lot from the instruction, so I am looking forward to learning and gaining a different perspective in 5302.

On a personal note, I am married and my wife, Gladys, is a student in the Art Department. As several of my classmates have expressed, we too feel as though we are working towards our degrees for the foreseeable future. My hobbies are salsa dancing, learning keyboarding, and playing video/board games.