John received his bachelor’s degree in Linguistics (Dean’s Honor List) from the University of Manitoba, Canada and his master’s degree in TESOL (distinctions in courses such as Communicative Language Teaching) from the University of London, UK. His teaching career spans more than twenty years, working in various institutions including secondary schools, the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education, and universities in Hong Kong.

In the past few years, John

• worked as one of the investigators on a 3-year project titled Mastering the Technical Vocabulary of STEM, with a funding of about HK$ 4.8 million;
• presented in a webinar on STEM vocabulary;
• gave three talks on operationalizing a needs analysis model, pronunciation audit, and drama & English pronunciation in the summer 2021 EYE, an “end-of-year” event organized by the Center of Language Education, HKUST.

In the summer 2022, bearing “divide and conquer” in mind, he first and foremost investigated “coherence”, one of the CLE core areas for learning in the newly adopted Common Core Competency Framework and gave a talk about the end-weight principle.

Awards

In 2021, he won a Teaching Award for Scholarship presented by CLE, HKUST.