Category: Graduate School of Education

Assistant Professor: TESOL

Dr. Vivian Bussinguer-Khavari is a TESOL Assistant Professor in the Anaheim University Graduate School of Education. Originally from Brasilia, Brazil, she was raised bilingually, acquiring both Portuguese and English simultaneously, while attending an international school from age 3 to 18. Upon high school completion, she was granted a full scholarship by the Japanese government, offered directly by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. She took up the challenge of studying in a brand-new environment and pursued higher education in Japan. After studying the Japanese language for one year at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, she was admitted into Kobe University, where she remained for both the undergraduate and graduate programs, completing her bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies, and eventually her master’s and doctoral degree in Applied Linguistics. From a very young age, she has experienced multicultural and multilingual settings and has built an interest and passion for both multiculturalism and multilingualism. She has conducted research in the field of Heritage Language Education (HLE), studying Nikkei-Brazilian immigrant families in Japan, investigating their school-aged children’s linguistic development in the L1 (Portuguese) and the L2 (Japanese), as well as the parents’ attitudes towards their children’s language learning. Other than HLE, her research interests include TESOL, intercultural communication, Performance-Assisted Learning (PAL), Performance in Education (PIE), and immigrant language education. She is an active member of the Japan Association for Language Teachers (JALT), having been the coordinator for their Speech, Drama and Debate (SD&D) Special Interest Group (SIG), now renamed to the Performance in Education (PIE) SIG, for four years and currently serving as their program chair. She continues to reside in Japan, where she has been teaching at the university level for the past decade, and is currently an associate professor at Kwansei Gakuin University as well as a lecturer at Kobe University.

Assistant Professor: TESOL

Dr. Stephen Ryan is a TESOL Assistant Professor in the Anaheim University Graduate School of Education and a professor in the School of Culture, Media, and Society at Waseda University in Tokyo. Stephen Ryan has been involved in language education for over 25 years, and for most of that time, he has been based in Japan. His research and publications cover various aspects of psychology in language learning, including the award-winning Exploring Psychology in Language Learning and Teaching, co-authored with Marion Williams and Sarah Mercer, and The Psychology of the Language Learner Revisited, co-authored with Zoltan Dörnyei. He is also series editor for the Multilingual Matters book series Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham School of English Studies and an M.A. in Linguistics (TESOL) from the University of Surrey.

Professor: TESOL

Dr. Sandra McKay was a TESOL Professor in the Anaheim University Graduate School of Education, Professor Emeritus of English at San Francisco State University and an affiliate faculty member in the Second Language Studies program at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. She received her doctorate from the college of education at the University of Minnesota in applied linguistics. Her main areas of work and research were second language teacher education, sociolinguistics (with a focus on English as an international English) and research methods. She also published and presented on topics related to culture, diversity and inclusion. Her books include Teaching English as an International Language: Rethinking Goals and Approaches (2002, Oxford University Press) which was the Winner of the Ben Warren International Book Award for outstanding teacher education materials, Sociolinguistics and Language Education (edited with Nancy Hornberger, 2010, Multilingual Matters) and Researching Second Language Classrooms (2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). She also published widely in international journals. She served as TESOL Quarterly editor from 1994 to 1999 and has served on the editorial advisory board for the Journal of Second Language Writing and the TESOL Quarterly. She received four Fulbright grants, as well as many academic specialist awards and distinguished lecturer invitations. Her research interest in English as an international language developed from her Fulbright Grants, academic specialists awards and 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.

Former Professor Emeritus TESOL and Graduate School of Education Associate Dean

A distinguished linguist known for her theory on “Dictogloss”, Dr. Ruth Wajnryb served as the word/language columnist for Australia’s leading newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald.