Dr Akiko Furukawa

Akiko Furukawa leads the Japanese Language Team in SLCL, and she is an expert in Applied Cognitive Linguistics and the Acquisition of Japanese as a Second/Foreign Language. 

She has an MA from Lancaster University and a PhD from SOAS University of London. She teaches Japanese and supervises PhD students in Applied Linguistics. She is also the Japan Year Abroad Coordinator and has actively engaged in work on student support during the year abroad, as well as collaborative work with Japanese partner universities. She leads the Inter-University Support Programme, which is a virtual year abroad programme created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is an undertaking commissioned and funded by the Embassy of Japan in the UK (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan) via the British Association for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language (BATJ) and it was also awarded a grant from the Japan Foundation.

Before joining SOAS, she worked as a Lecturer in Japanese and the Head of Japanese at the University of Reading, where she also co-supervised postgraduate students in Applied Linguistics as a lecturer.

She actively engages in pedagogical research and is currently a BATJ Journal editor and a reviewer for academic associations, an academic publisher and other organisations. She also leads the BATJ CEFR-JF Standard Research Group.

• Cognitive Linguistics
• Applied Cognitive Linguistics
• Acquisition of Japanese as a Second/Foreign language
• Curriculum and Syllabus Design
• Pragmatics