David Paul started David English House in an apartment in Hiroshima in 1982. Within 15 years, there were 50 full-time teachers and staff in Hiroshima and about the same again in franchises in Thailand and Korea. David English House closed in 2010 for financial reasons, but in 28 years, the schools taught over 100,000 students in Hiroshima alone, and made a considerable contribution to the local community.

David English House became widely respected throughout East Asia for its high educational standards and for the extensive support it provided for the professional development of English language teachers, especially through teacher training and establishing and supporting distance MA programs from British universities in Japan.

Since the early 1990’s, David has written a number of best-selling books, focusing on applying constructivist, student-centered ideas to the East Asian ELT classroom.

In 1999, David founded ETJ (English Teachers in Japan), a volunteer group for supporting the professional development of teachers. The aim was to build a supportive community for busy classroom teachers who generally didn’t join existing associations for teachers. ETJ now has about 10,000 members and is playing a key role in ELT throughout Japan. There is still a lot to do, and ETJ still has enormous potential as a concept, but there is little doubt about the impact that it has already had.

These days, David is president of Language Teaching Professionals, and spends much of his time developing resources to support and train teachers of children. 

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