English Conversations was co-founded in 2005 by Mark White and Aaron Campbell, who had been teaching English together in the Faculty of Intercultural Communications at Ryukoku University in Japan.

Mark White

Mark White was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1961 but grew up in country Queensland (Blackall and Mt Isa), where his father was a shearer and a miner. He studied law, history, and modern languages at the University of Queensland (B.A. 1985) and also completed the R.S.A. TESOL Certificate at International House in London in 1984.

He lived for many years in various countries in Europe and later Asia, where he worked as an English teacher and studied foreign languages, including German, French, Russian, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Thai. He met Aaron Campbell in Kyoto in 2001 and they began working on internet educational projects together. He has been an English teacher for twenty-two years.

He went on to earn a Graduate Diploma in Teaching (2004) and a Master of Applied Linguistics (2005) from the University of Southern Queensland.

He divides his time between North-east Thailand, where his wife and three children were born; Japan, where he is at home in the beautiful city of Kyoto with Aaron; and Australia, where he lives on Tamborine Mountain overlooking the Gold Coast, but spends a lot of time on the road interviewing people and creating materials for EnglishConversations.org.

He has been a writer and a teacher all his working life. He writes poetry, plays novels and film scripts as well as teaching materials. He creates most of the content for English Conversations.

His current and long-term interests are literature, history, religion, geography, art and language, in particular how language interplays with thought to form the basis of our cognitive system. He believes passionately that learning languages is a transformative, mind-expanding experience which helps us to understand each other and brings us closer to each other and the world soul. He is trying to learn as many languages as he can in an attempt to understand everything.

Aaron Campbell

Born on the banks of the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis, Tennessee in the early 1970s, Aaron grew up moving around the United States as a child. Trips to Europe and Central America as a teenager fueled his interest in traveling and foreign language and culture. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1994 with a degree in interdisciplinary studies, and following a short stint as a research assistant in molecular biology in San Francisco, he headed to the Far East in 1996 to immerse himself in Asian culture. He now lives in Kyoto, Japan with his wife and two daughters.

Aaron has taught English as a Foreign Language (EFL) since 1996 and now teaches business presentation, academic writing, and communication skills to students in the Faculty of Business Administration at Ritsumeikan University. He also served as academic advisor for Global College of Long Island University’s Japan Center from 2003~2007. He holds a Masters degree in Education (MEd) from the University of Sheffield, U.K. Professional interests include Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), learner autonomy, experiential education, and deep, meaningful approaches to language learning. In addition to spending time with his family, he enjoys hiking, camping, cooking, traveling, and hanging out with friends. He speaks Spanish, Japanese, and a bit of Chinese.

You can connect with Aaron on Facebook and Twitter.