Akiko Kashiwagi-Wood

Akiko Kashiwagi-Wood
Associate Professor of Japanese

360 O'Dowd Hall
248-370-4565
[email protected]

DEGREE: Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures (Focus: Japanese Linguistics), The Ohio State University

RESEARCH INTERESTS: Second/Foreign Language Acquisition, Japanese/Foreign Language Pedagogy, Sentence Processing

Akiko Kashiwagi-Wood received her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and joined Oakland University in 2011. Her principal research interest is second language acquisition  and Japanese/foreign language pedagogy. Her teaching responsibilities at Oakland University include all levels of courses in the Japanese program, such as Japanese language, grammar, and composition. Since 2020, she runs collaborative learning experiences between her classes and university students from University of Shizuoka in Japan every Fall. She is the faculty advisor for Japanese majors and the Japanese STEP program.

Since 2020, Akiko has been also serving as a liaison for an online collaborative learning program called Shiga-Michigan Assembly Program (SMAP) for Youth for K-12 schools in Michigan and her sister state, Shiga Prefecture, in Japan. She is currently serving as the president of Japanese Teachers Association of Michigan (JTAM).  She believes that learning new languages makes us more open to other cultures and broadens our worldview, and her professional goal is to work towards increasing visibility of Japanese language education through promotion and advocacy.

Outside of work, Akiko enjoys spending time with her family and her dogs, and taking a trail walk.

SELECTED LIST OF PUBLICATIONS:

Kashiwagi-Wood, A. (2021). Learning the Narrative Characteristic: Perspective Taking in Written  Japanese as a Foreign Language. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 12 (5), 631-640. 

Kashiwagi-Wood, A & Sawasaki, K. (2017). The effect of proficiency on L2 Japanese sentence processing. In M. Hirakawa, J. Matthews, K. Otaki, N. Snape, & M. Umeda (Eds.), Proceedings of PacSLRF 2016. Paper presented at 2016 Pacific Second Language Research Forum, Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan, 9-11, September (pp.109-114). Chuo University Co-op, Printing Division. 

Sawasaki, K. & Kashiwagi-Wood, A. (2015). Issues in L2 Japanese sentence processing: similarities/differences with L1 and individual differences in working memory. In M. Nakayama (Ed.) Handbook of Japanese Psycholinguistics (pp. 511-544). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.