Chapter Contribution

📊 OkiJALT's Scholar Databases - A Gift to the JALT Network

Finding the right speaker for a conference or chapter meeting is one of the most time-consuming challenges in JALT chapter management. Okinawa JALT has done the research - and we are sharing it with everyone.

Why We Built These

When President Norman Fewell returned to the chapter presidency, one of the first things he identified was a gap in the resources available to JALT chapters for finding qualified English-medium presenters. The official JALT lists were, in his view, inadequate and based on non-essential criteria. So he built something better - from scratch.

Database 1: General Presenter Database

A curated list of 246 prominent English-medium scholars currently affiliated with institutions across Japan, selected on the basis of academic prominence and publication record.

📍 Sorted by city for easy regional recruitment
📚 Average 61 publications per scholar
🏆 Highest publication count: 164 (Ken Hyland, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
🌏 23 cities represented
🔬 Research areas: SLA, Vocabulary, EAP, Assessment, EdTech, Corpus Linguistics, Pragmatics, Policy

Database 2: JALT Associated Presenter Directory

A second database of 288 scholars with active JALT affiliation, compiled specifically to support JALT-connected event programming and inter-chapter speaker sharing.

📍 Also sorted by location
🤝 JALT-connected - ideal for chapter co-events and joint programming
📬 Contact details included where publicly available

How We Shared It

Both databases were compiled by President Fewell and shared with all JALT Chapter Presidents at the Chapter Presidents Basecamp on June 10, 2026. This means every chapter in Japan now has access to a validated, organized, and up-to-date resource for presenter recruitment - courtesy of Okinawa JALT.

This is what it looks like when a chapter contributes back to the national network. We are not just organizing events in Naha - we are helping language educators connect across all of Japan.

If you are interested in the databases for your own institution or research connections, reach out to us directly.

🌺 Okinawa JALT · okijalt@gmail.com · okijalt.org

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