FACULTY
Yuri Kumagai
Senior Lecturer in Japanese
| Send E-mail | Office: Dewey Hall 209 | Phone: 585-3478 |
| Office Hours: M 1–3 p.m. or by appointment |
Yuri Kumagai has been teaching Japanese language to college students in the United States for more than 15 years. At Smith, she teaches all levels of Japanese language courses. Well-grounded in her training and expertise in applied linguistics, sociocultural theories and critical approach in foreign language education, she has been developing a project-based language learning curriculum by collaborating with other Japanese language teacher-researchers worldwide. One of the aims for this collaboration is to connect her students with other Japanese language users beyond the classroom and to help them critically engage in the use of Japanese language in various contexts.
Kumagai has been active in presenting her research findings nationally and internationally, and her publications appear in numerous journals and in edited books both in English and in Japanese. Her most recent book, Assessment and Japanese Language Education (co-edited), was published in 2010 by Kuroshio Shuppan, Tokyo. She is currently writing an intermediate Japanese language textbook, A Japanese Reader: Reading as a Social Practice, to be published by Routledge in spring 2012.
Kumagai earned a doctoral degree in language, literacy and culture, and an M.Ed. in international education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include: critical literacy and multiliteracies in foreign language, analysis of classroom discourse and interactions, and ideology and language.














