(Co-hosted by the Fukui Chapter and Material Writers SIG) (Interview conducted by Fukui Chapter President, Robert Dykes)
Andy Boon has written more than a dozen graded readers ranging from ghost stories to self-help. Robert Dykes is approaching this interview as someone who is interested in getting into the graded reader industry. Andy has worked with multiple publishers and not every proposal ended up a finished product, but Andy has had far more successes than failures. Robert will pick his brain about every step of the process and what we can expect when trying to get our first graded reader published.
Andrew Boon is a professor in the faculty of humanities at Toyo Gakuen University. He has been teaching in Japan for over 15 years and holds a PhD from Aston University. His research focuses on learner support and discovery in non-judgmental environments. He has been an active member of the Japan Association for Language Teaching since 2004, has presented at numerous conferences, and has published articles on teacher development, motivation, and methodology.
He is the co-author of textbooks Discover the News (Language Solutions, 2013), and Inspire (Cengage – National Geographic), and the author of several graded readers including Zombies in Tokyo and Brainstorm for the Atama-ii Series; and This is Facebook, Homestay in the UK, and Culture Shock in Japan (Macmillan).
Robert Dykes has been living in Japan for nearly 15 years. He will soon be leaving his long home of Fukui and moving to Kumamoto to teach at Sojo University. He loves all the work he does with JALT and currently volunteers for at least 6 different positions with them, he lost count. He hopes his work with the Material Writer's SIG and proofreading transcribed interviews for The Language Teacher has prepared him the live interview format, something he hopes will become a regular event in JALT's future.
