Keiko Kuriyama « Faculty
Japanese language program coordinator 
Assistant Professor, EALC
kkuriyam 
indiana.edu
Goodbody Hall 223
(812) 855-3124
Education
- PhD, Linguistics, University at Buffalo (SUNY), 2007
Research Interests
- Language pedagogy
- Computer/web-based Language Testing
- Japanese linguistics
- First and second language acquisition
- Phonology and language processing
Courses Recently Taught
- EALC- J101 Elementary Japanese I
- EALC- J102 Elementary Japanese II
- EALC- J110 Japanese for Advanced Beginners
- EALC- J201 Second Year Japanese I
- EALC- J202 Second Year Japanese II
- EALC- J313 Business Japanese
- EALC- J425/525 Teaching Japanese as a Foreign/Second Language
Awards and Distinctions
- The EALC 2012 Trustees Teaching Award (2012)
- Teacher of the Year from Association of Indiana Teachers of Japanese (2012)
- The NCJLT Teacher Award from National Council of Japanese Language Teachers (2011)
- Contest Grant from the Japan Foundation Los Angeles (2011)
- Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning Active Learning Grant (2011)
- The 2010 Cheng & Tsui Professional Development Award (2010)
- College of Arts and Sciences Summer Faculty Fellowship (2010)
- The EALC 2010 Trustees Teaching Award (2010)
- College of Arts and Sciences Summer Faculty Fellowship (2009)
- Princeton University, Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning Grant (2005-2006)
Publication Highlights
- “Improving Japanese Language Education Through Articulation and Content-Learning.” Oshirase, No. 18, Vol. 6, (2011)
- “Challenges of Using CBI in Lower-Level FL Classes: Toward a Practical Model of CBI for Beginning-Level Students.” Proceedings of the 18th Princeton Japanese Pedagogy Forum, 107-118, (2011).
- “Anxiety and Motivation in First-Year Japanese: How True Beginners and Advanced Beginners Affect Each Other.” Ed., Mariko M. Wei and Atsushi Fukada, Proceedings of the 22nd Central Association of Teachers of Japanese Conference, 56-61, (2010).
- “An Examination of Advanced Beginner Japanese: Attitude Surveys of Pure and Advanced Beginners.” Ed., Mutsuko Endo, Proceedings of the 21st Central Association of Teachers of Japanese Conference, 149-162, (2009).
- “A Corpus-Based Investigation of the Japanese Numeral Classifier “do”: A Modification of Prior Semantic Analyses.” Proceedings of the 15th Princeton Japanese Pedagogy Forum, 66-80, (2008).
- “New Trends in Business Japanese Education in America.” Journal of Technical Japanese Education, VOL 4, 11-16, (2002). (Co-authors: K. Kuriyama, & K. Tanihara)
- “The Acquisition of Stative Verbs in Japanese: An Analysis of Child Narratives.” Proceedings of Western Conference of Linguistics, Vol 13, 218-232, (2001).
I grew up in Chiba, Japan, which is where I also began my postsecondary education. In the U.S., I completed my B.A and went on to get my M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York). Before coming to IU in the fall of 2008, I taught at the University at Buffalo, Princeton University and Randolph College (formerly Randolph-Macon Women’s College).
My goal as a teacher is to help my students discover the joy of language-learning and to make them life-long Japanese language users. I believe students are most motivated to learn foreign languages when they participate in language-learning activities that they find interesting, enjoyable, and practically useful. While motivation is critical to successful language-learning, intellectually stimulating and practically useful activities do not always adequately promote language accuracy. For this reason, my approach to teaching combines aspects of several different methods: I not only employ communicative and content- and task-based instructional techniques and materials, but also provide explicit linguistic instruction.
My research interests are in linguistics and second language pedagogy, and my current research in pedagogy is closely connected to my approach to teaching. I am developing a content- and task-based model for teaching foreign language to beginning- and intermediate-level postsecondary students. My current linguistics research is on spoken language processing in Japanese. In my study, I use elicited speech errors both to challenge the view that the mora is the fundamental rhythmic unit of spoken language processing in Japanese and to support the view that there are universal, underlying cognitive mechanisms for speech production planning (an aspect of spoken language processing).
