Ballot forms were sent to members in January. If you are a regular member of the ATJ, please vote. Short biographies of the candidates can be found below. Select up to FIVE (5) candidates to serve on the Board of Directors from April 1, 2000 to March 31, 2003, to fill the vacancies created by those whose terms expire on March 31, 2000. Your ballot must be received in the ATJ offices no later than March 3, 2000, or you can bring it to the ATJ general membership meeting to be held from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. on March 11, 2000 at the Town and Country Convention Center, San Diego, California. The ballots will be counted at this meeting. Members who have not voted by mail may vote at that time. Note: Your ballot will be invalid if your membership has expired.

James Dorsey, Dartmouth College
James Dorsey earned an M.A. at Indiana University and his Ph.D. at the University of Washington. Since his arrival at Dartmouth College in 1997, he has taught classes in Japanese language and literature and twice led Dartmouth's ten-week foreign study pro- gram in Japan. With academic interests in modern Japanese fiction, criticism and noh drama, Dorsey is currently finishing a book on Kobayashi Hideo and co-editing a volume of essays on, and translations from, the writer Sakaguchi Ango. His non-academic interests include the martial arts, his twenty-year-old motorcycle, and exploring the back roads of New England.

Carl Falsgraf, Center for Applied Japanese Language Studies, Oregon
Carl Falsgraf has been director of the Center for Applied Japanese Language Studies (CAJLS) at the University of Oregon since receiving his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1994. CAJLS has been a leader in developing and implementing standards, assessments, and professional development programs for Japanese language teachers. Falsgraf also teaches graduate courses in research methodology and language pedagogy as an adjunct at the University of Oregon and is currently on temporary assignment as a Japanese language teacher at Cal Young Middle School in Eugene, OR.

Kazue Kanno, University of Manoa
Kazue Kanno (Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Hawaii at Manoa 1992) is Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Manoa, where she has been teaching since 1991. She also taught Japanese at the University of Calgary in Canada, where she started the Japanese language program. Dr. Kanno's research areas include Japanese pedagogical grammar, second language acquisition, Japanese syntax, and sentence parsing. She has an edited book just published by John Benjamins entitled The Acquisition of Japanese as a Second Language.

Ryuko Kubota University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Ryuko Kubota, Ph.D. (The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto) has been teaching college-level Japanese for 12 years and has been involved in second language teacher training for 8 years. She recently served on the National Task Force on Japanese Language Competency Goals. She is also an active member of the Southeast Association for Teachers of Japanese. Her teaching and research interests include culture, technology, second language writing, and multicultural education. She is currently an assistant professor in the Curriculum in Asian Studies and the School of Edu- cation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Phyllis Larson, St. Olaf College
Phyllis Larson completed her Ph.D.in Japanese literature at the University of Minnesota in 1985. She established two high school Japanese language programs and taught in them for three years before taking a position in the Japan Studies Program at Macalester College. After five years, she moved to the Asian Studies Department at St. Olaf College, where she is now an associate professor. With a Fulbright Research Award, she spent Sept-Dec. 1999 of her sabbatical year based at Waseda University in Tokyo, where she conducted research on the wartime writings and activities of the writer Tamura Toshiko (1884-1945). In the last half of her sabbatical, she will be at home in Northfield, working on translations of Tamura's fiction and writing a critical biographical essay. She regularly teaches second and third year Japanese at St. Olaf, in addition to literature and general Asian Studies courses. In language teaching, she has a particular interest in developing models of self-managed language learning. In summer 1999, she participated in an NFLRC Workshop at the University of Hawaii on "Self-Directed Learning: Materials and Strategies." Since fall 1998 she has served on the Executive Committee of the ADFL.

Erik Lofgren, Bucknell University
After receiving his M.A. in Japanese from Indiana University, Erik Lofgren went on to study at Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in Japanese with a dissertation focused on issues of selfhood in the immediate post-war fiction of Umezaki Haruo and Ooka Shohei. His research interests currently center around death and the self in the works of Furui Yoshikichi. He is now teaching Japanese language and literature at Bucknell University, where he has taught since 1997. He has also taught Japanese at Stanford and the Middlebury College Summer Language Program.

Naomi McGloin, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Naomi McGloin is a full professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1972, and she has been teaching Japanese language and linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1976. At Wisconsin, she served as Chair of the department in 1990-93. She has also served as an editor of the ATJ Newsletter (1984-90), as a member of the Japan Foundation's advisory committee for language-related programs in the U.S. (1994-96), and as a member of the advisory committee for the ATJ-USJF summer fellowship program for secondary language teach- ers (1995-98). She also organized the ATJ Thursday Seminar in 1997. She has published many articles and books in the field of Japanese language and linguistics, including A Student's Guide to Japanese Grammar (Taishukan); An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese (co-authored with A. Miura, The Japan Times); "Negation," in Syntax and Semantics 5 (Academic Press, and Aspects of Japanese Women's Language (co-edited with S. Ide, Kuroiso).

Kazuko Nakajima, University of Toronto
Kazuko Nakajima, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto, teaches Japanese language and a graduate program in Japanese Language Pedagogy. She is President Emerita, Canadian Association for Japanese Language Education, after having served as founding President for ten years. Her special interests include: (a) Computer-enhanced language education. She successfully organized the 2nd International Conference on Computer Technology and Japanese Language Education (CASTEL/J 99) in the summer of 1999; (b) Heritage Language and Bilingual Education. Her recent publications include Bairingaru Kyoiku no Houhou (Methodologies of Bilingual Education), ALC Press 1998; Kotoba to Kyoiku (Language and Edu- cation) 1998, Keishougo to Shite no Nihongo (Japanese as a Heritage Language) (chief editor), 1997, and Oral Proficiency Assessment for Bilingual Children, which will be published in March 2000.

Yoshiko Saito-Abbott, California State University at Monterey Bay
Dr. Yoshiko Saito-Abbott is Associate Professor of Japanese at California State Uni- versity, Monterey Bay, where she directs the Japanese program. A Ph.D. in Foreign Language Education and Instructional Design Technology from The Ohio State University, she writes and presents in the areas of Computer Assisted Instruction, Reading, Anxiety, and Business Japanese, and organizes an annual regional Language & Technology Conference. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Modern Lan- guage Journal, Foreign Language Annals, and CALICO Journal. She is the site director of the Monterey Bay Foreign Language Project, which serves K-16 teachers of all languages in the central coast area. She also established the first state recognized credential program for Japanese teachers in Texas. Recently she directed the California Japanese Framework Project.

Patricia Thornton, Minnesota Public Schools/University of Minnesota
Patricia Thornton has been a teacher of Japanese for ten years in the Minneapolis Public Schools, where she worked extensively with the world languages departments and the departments of English and social studies to develop cross-disciplinary approaches to instruction. Working with CARLA at the University of Minnesota, Thornton developed a framework for Japanese language and culture instruction and articulation at the secondary level. Thornton has served on the NCJLT board and on various ATJ working group committees. Additionally, she served as both the curriculum director and dean of the Japanese Village of Concordia Language Villages for 7 years where she developed language and culture curricula infusing literature, history, and arts into K-12 Japanese instruction. Thornton holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota with a double major in Japanese and East Asian Studies, a master's degree from the University of St. Thomas in education and is certified for secondary teaching in both Japanese and English Language Arts. She is currently working in the College of Education at the Uni- versity of Minnesota coordinating the Teacher Residency Program a collaborative effort between Minneapolis Public Schools and the University to assist new teachers in their adjustment to the inner-city classroom and provide continued professional development as a way of reducing attrition in pre-collegiate teaching.