David English House was founded by David Paul in a private apartment in Hiroshima. Students ranged from elementary school children to advanced adults. There was a very friendly atmosphere in the school even though it grew so quickly. Many students also went camping together, played tennis or soccer together, had parties and bonded into a community. There were 100 students in the first year, 200 in the second year, 400 in the 3rd year, 800 in the fourth year ... The school had to move to larger premises four times in the first seven years.

From the beginning, one of the aims was to help professionalize and internationalize English language teaching. At first the focus was just on the Hiroshima area. This was later extended to Japan, and then to a number of Asian countries.

David English House began supplying teachers to elementary schools, junior/senior high schools and universities in the Hiroshima area. We supplied both full-time and part-time teachers to many schools in Hiroshima prefecture. In some areas we worked closely with local boards of education which sometimes meant that our teachers lived in very rural areas. We also supplied teachers to most of the leading private junior/senior high schools in Hiroshima city.

It was a great privilege to be so accepted within the Japanese educational system. It also meant we could help motivate students who might not normally be interested in English. The students in our own schools tended to already be interested in learning English, but students at regular elementary schools, high schools and universities may or more not be interested. This posed a stimulating challenge to us as educators.

Our schools in Hiroshima developed and grew. We took enormous risks without any capital or outside investment, until, by the end of this period, about 10,000 students were learning English from us at any one time in Hiroshima prefecture. At this point, we made a policy decision not to have schools in other parts of Japan. One reason for this was to ensure that all our staff could have some human contact with each other. Another was that we felt it was more valuable to try and become more deeply involved in the Hiroshima community, rather than less deeply involved in more communities. The third main reason was that one of our new aims was to help professionalize ELT throughout Japan. This would involve training teachers, publishing magazines, and developing materials to be used by other schools. This wouldn't work if we were also in competition with schools in other parts of Japan.

David English House secured the contract to deal with English language support for the Hiroshima Asian Games; David Paul founded and became President of The City League, a soccer league in Hiroshima which has about 100 university, company and area teams, and was run by the David English House office; David also became the British representative on the Hiroshima Japan-British Society committee, the principle international association for leading academics and businessmen in Hiroshima... and there was much more like this. At the same time that these kinds of things were happening, we were sending more and more teachers to work at schools and universities, and our teachers were getting involved in many different aspects of Hiroshima life. All this led to David English House becoming a deeply respected part of the Hiroshima community.

When Finding Out, David Paul's course for elementary school children, was published and quickly became an international bestseller, we began to realize that a lot of the teaching ideas we had been developing in Hiroshima were quite different from prevailing methodologies, and we found we had a lot of things to say that teachers wanted to listen to.

David started doing workshops on student-initiated learning all over Japan; we published three free magazines for teachers and sent them out to any teachers in Japan who requested them; Communicate was published and also became a bestseller... and we began to realize there was a lot we could do to support teachers in Japan.

Many things began to happen at the same time. We became the Japan representative for the University of Birmingham Distance MA in TEFL/TESL, and the course immediately became the most popular course of its kind in Japan. On the strength of this, we began looking for a Distance MA in Japanese. Everybody we asked suggested Sheffield, so we approached the School of East Asian Studies at Sheffield and we began representing two Sheffield Distance MAs in Japanese and a Japanese language course for beginners.

While all this was going on, we began to develop our own training courses in teaching children, and started running all over the place training teachers.

We also became the Japan office for the leading ELT Journals and magazines (English Teaching professional, ELT Journal, Applied Linguistics, and Modern English Teacher), and for COBUILD and Delta Publishing.

Somewhere among all of this, Finding Out and Communicate became popular in a number of other countries, and David got invited to start training teachers overseas, especially in Thailand and Korea. We started franchise training centers in both these countries, and began to train large numbers of elementary school teachers who were having to teach English for the first time. We also became consultants for various chain schools, teacher training courses, and for the Thai Ministry of Education.

We launched ETJ (English Teachers in Japan) in 1999. The aim was to build a community of teachers who would work together to professionalize ELT in Japan. It went slowly at first, but after about a year things began to take off, and ETJ is now 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.

ETJ has high-quality publications, active e-mail discussion groups, regional groups for teachers of children all over Japan, very well-attended training courses in teaching Japanese students, major ELT Expos, high quality publications... and much more.

●To create a new kind of school - not a 'juku' and not a conversation school. In Japanese, we call ourselves an 'English Education Center'.

●To go beyond teaching a rich elite or westernized students, and to become a relevant part of Hiroshima society.

●To be a school rather than a business.

●To be as professional as possible, and yet, at the same time, teach with sensitivity and warmth, realizing that effective teachers emphasize both of these aspects of teaching.

●To try and influence high schools to use more learner-initiated and communicative methods.

●To encourage students to learn by investigation, practice, and personalization, rather than by memorization and teacher-initiated or mechanical methods.

●To combat the tendency of students to become dependent on material, teachers or mechanical methods.

●To encourage the exchange of teaching ideas among English teachers in Asia, and to help teachers develop learner-initiated methods that are effective in Asian teaching situations

●To help bridge the gap between psychology, particularly constructivist psychology, and EFL classroom practice in Asia.

●To encourage the professional development of ELT in Asia