Yumiko Adachi
ALSLA Doctoral Student
Bio
Yumiko Adachi became deeply interested in teaching Japanese as a foreign language as she was taking courses for a certificate at her university in Japan. This led her to teach Japanese at a vocational school in China, after which she became a Japanese TA at Middlebury College for a couple of years. These experiences fueled her desire to learn more about the Japanese language and pedagogy, which led her to pursue a master's degree in Japanese linguistics at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
She later became the coordinator of the Japanese studies program at West Virginia University (WVU), where she worked for 8 years building the program. Yumiko has always had a strong interest in Kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) and how best to teach them to students. During her time at WVU, she realized how important it is to infer the meaning of unfamiliar Kanji compounds in authentic texts, which inspired her to come to 麻豆村 to pursue research in this area.
Education
M.A.,Japanese Linguistics, University of Wisconsin—Madison
B.A., Political Science (with Certificate in Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language), International Christian University
Areas of Interest
- Second language reading
- Word recognition
- Lexical inferencing