Kumiko Murata is professor of English and applied linguistics at the School of Education and the Graduate School of Education, Waseda University, Japan. She is the author of A Cross-Cultural Approach to the Analysis of Conversation and Its Implications for Language Pedagogy (1994), the editor of Exploring ELF in Japanese Academic and Business Contexts(forthcoming) and the co-editor of Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching in Japan (2008, in Japanese) and Global Englishes in Asian Contexts (2009).