I am teaching Japanese linguistics courses at the University of Maryland. In Fall 2023, I taught The Sounds and Dialects of Japanese. I developed this class myself based on my research interests and potential students’ interests. What makes this class special is to cover the sound properties of non-Tokyo varieties of Japanese to promote dialect diversity in Japanese, which is often ignored in Japanese language classes and Japanese linguistics. The class materials can be found here.
In Spring 2024, I will be teaching Linguistic History of Japanese. This class is an overview of the Japanese language history, starting from Old Japanese in the Nara Period (8th century). In the class, I plan to cover Ryukyuan languages because it has been shown that Old Japanese and Ryukyuan languages were derived from Proto-Japonic and that some Ryukyuan languages still have features of Old Japanese. I believe that this is another type of promoting language diversity.
Teaching Japanese language is my passion. I started teaching Japanese at Syracuse University in 2014. I learned the communicative language teaching (CLT) approach with Dr. Amanda Brown there and taught Japanese as a primary instructor. At Cornell University, I taught Japanese as a teaching assistant. The Japanese language program at Cornell uses an outgrowth of what used to be called the Jordan Method, which has elements of audio-lingual as well as communicative methods.