Plenary Speakers
Kazumi Yamada
Kwansei Gakuen University
Kazumi Yamada obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Essex, UK, where she studied under the supervision of Professor Roger Hawkins. Her research interests include adult second language acquisition, third language acquisition, and the acquisition of sign language. After teaching ESL and conducting research in second language acquisition at Osaka Jogakuin College in Osaka, she moved to Kwansei Gakuin University (KGU) in 2010, where she is currently a full-time Professor, teaching courses related to language acquisition, including ESL. She is the 2017 recipient of the JCHAT award from the Japanese Society for Language Sciences. She is co-editor-in-chief of Second Language and serves as a committee member for Japan Second Language Association and Japanese Society of Language Sciences. She is currently Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton (UK), where she participates in regular reading group meetings organized by Professor Roumyana Slabakova, with professors and PhD students in the Languages Cultures and Linguistics Department.
Neal Snape
Gunma Prefectural
Women's University
The Acquisition of Determiners in L3 German:
Teasing apart L1 / L2 Transfer Effects
Neal Snape obtained his MA and PhD in Language and Linguistics from the University of Essex, UK. He completed a post-doc at the University of Calgary and taught ESL classes, and then went on to teach EFL and Linguistics at Hokkaido University. His research interests include adult second language acquisition, heritage language acquisition, returnees and third language acquisition. He is currently a full-time Professor in the Department of English at Gunma Prefectural Women’s University, Japan and a part-time Professor at Chuo University where he teaches second language acquisition, bilingualism, psycholinguistics and phonetics and phonology courses.
He currently serves as a committee member for Japan Society of Language Sciences and Japan Second Language Association. He is also Associate Editor of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, sits on the advisory board for the Journal of the European Second Language Association and is a member of the Second Language Research editorial board and Pedagogical Linguistics editorial board.
Kazumi Sakai
Dokkyo University
Japan as a multilingual society and language education
Kazumi Sakai is Professor Emeritus at Keio University. Since 2022, he has been teaching German as a foreign language and German teacher education courses as a specially-appointed professor at Dokkyo University. He also teaches teacher trainees at Chuo University. He has studied German language and literature, western philosophy and history of arts in Tokyo, Münster and Berlin. His research interests include plurilingualism, language policy, teacher training, and educational technology.
He has served for decades as an executive member of the Japanese Society for German Literature and two terms as president of the Japanese German Teachers Association. He is also a founding executive member of the Japan Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (JACTFL) and the editor-in-chief of its journal. Recent works include: K. Sakai et al. (2022) Gaikokugo kyoiku o kaeru tame ni (Towards Changing Foreign Language Education in Japan), Sanshusha; K. Sakai et al. (2018) Kotoba o oshieru, kotoba o manabu: Fuku-gengo, fuku-bunka, CEFR to gengo kyōiku (Teaching and Learning Languages: Plurilingualism, Pluriculturalism, CEFR, and Language Education), Kōrosha.
John Archibald
University of Victoria
John Archibald, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has been a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Victoria and the University of Calgary. His area of research specialization is second and third language speech, where he has focused on the role of phonological theory in explaining the properties of multilingual sound systems. He has probed the acquisition of new features, segments, syllable structure, and stress. Broadly viewed, his research addresses both Plato's Problem (how we come to know what we know based on impoverished input) and Orwell's Problem (how we remain resistant to certain knowledge in the presence of abundant input); both of these constructs are central to understanding multilingual speech. He is a former Dean of Humanities, and former President of the Canadian Linguistic Association. He is co-editor, with William O'Grady, of Contemporary Linguistic Analysis. His new book Phonology in Multilingual Grammars: Representational Complexity and Linguistic Interfaces is about to be released by Oxford University Press.