Forty-three Years Cheerleading for Pharmacy Students and Pharmacists as an English Teacher

This review reflects on my 43 years of teaching and research at Showa Pharmaceutical University (SPU), Japan. As an English teacher, I have struggled with the question, “How can I, with no specialized knowledge of pharmacy, support pharmacy students and pharmacists?” During my career, a flood of reforms swept through English, university, and pharmacy education. I was able to survive thanks to the support of my teachers, colleagues, students, and alumni. I graduated from the Literature Department at Rikkyo University and joined the foreign language office at SPU in 1979 and started research in English literature at Rikkyo the following year. In 1995, I was promoted to lecturer at SPU and assigned to teach the first and second-year students English. I joined the English for specific purposes (ESP) Study Group of the Japan Association of College English Teachers to promote English education grounded in specialized education, and in 2000 was in charge of the pharmaceutical section of the survey “The Current Status of ESP Education at Universities.” In 2005, I was promoted to Associate Professor and in 2007, I joined other teachers in founding the Japan Association of Pharmaceutical English (JAPE), aiming to develop English teaching materials that fit the core curriculum of the six-year pharmacy education introduced in 2006. By 2021 we had published nine textbooks on pharmaceutical English. In 2006, I introduced drama lessons for first year students, to develop their social awareness of their colleagues. These approaches enabled my students to give presentations at academic conferences.