About Dr. Cooper
Dr. Jason Cole, the creator of English by Dr. Cooper, has graduated from some of the most prestigious universities in the world. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from Dartmouth College, two Master’s degrees from Columbia University (the first in Creative Writing, the second in Applied Linguistics), and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Oxford. He speaks five languages (Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian, Greek) and is completely bilingual in Brazilian Portuguese and English.
He has lived in the United States, Brazil, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Korea and Spain, and is also a published author. Starting with a book on the specific language acquisition difficulties apparent with Korean, 399 ways to break with Korean English in 2008, he then published a highly praised 2016 article in System, the leading Applied Linguistics journal, addressing the acquisition of English by Brazilians.
His Oxford PhD thesis, ‘Foreign language learning in the age of the Internet: A comparison of informal acquirers and traditional classroom learners in Central Brazil’, was described by world-renowned linguist Professor Phil Benson, as “a major contribution to research on learning beyond the classroom and a significant contribution to second language acquisition research more generally’.
WHY ‘DR. COOPER’?
In Brazil, Jason was given the nickname ‘Cooper’ because as a dedicated athlete he was always “fazendo cooper”. The nickname stuck, and now his Brazilian family, friends and students call him Cooper, including his mother! Though his Oxford diploma lists him as Dr. Cole, he will always be affectionately known as Cooper… Dr. Cooper!
