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Professor Yan Wang from the Modern Languages Department and the Asian Studies Program recently wrapped up a semester-long sabbatical during which she conducted research and completed several publications.

She continued work in her primary research areas of Japanese and Chinese linguistics, studying language usage in conversational contexts and considering language behavior in the light of the surrounding social and discourse contexts. Much of her data has been collected from the naturally occurring discourse of native speakers, but during her sabbatical she also began to investigate Japanese learners’ data and explore language teaching methods from a sociocultural perspective.

While on sabbatical she presented two papers:

  • “Revisit student-generated video projects in language teaching from socio cultural approach,” presented at the 31st Annual Southeastern Association of Teachers of Japanese (SEATJ) Conference at Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
  • “A study of the pragmatic uses of chotto ‘a little’ by non-native Japanese speakers: from the perspective of intersubjectivity,” presented at the 2017 Annual Conference of Association of Teachers of Japanese (AATJ) in Toronto, the most prestigious conference in the field of Japanese education in North America.

In addition, she completed two papers for publication in a peer-reviewed journal and a scholarly monograph:

  • “Intersubjectivity in Chinese and Japanese Yes-no Questions,”was recently published in the journal, Intercultural Communication Studies.
  • “A functional study of the Japanese epistemic marker-kamo” will soon be published in Recent Advances in Japanese Grammar and Discourse, edited by Endo Hudson and Junko More.

Congratulations to Professor Wang for her excellent and exciting work!