Sachiko Yasuda, Ph.D.

Sachiko Yasuda is a professor in the School of Languages and Communication at Kobe University, where she teaches undergraduate courses in academic English and graduate courses on second language acquisition, foreign language pedagogy, language assessment, and research methods. 

She began her teaching career at the high school level in the 1990s, and this experience motivated her to study more about how people learn another language.  She then moved to Australia and received her Master's degree in applied linguistics from Monash University in 2004. After that she returned to Japan and worked as a research associate at Waseda University, where she was in charge of writing consultations at the Writing Center. In 2006, she was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship and moved to the United States to pursue a doctoral degree. She received her Ph.D. degree in Second Language Studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2012.

Her main area of research is in second language acquisition, particularly academic literacy development of adult foreign language (FL) learners. She has long-standing interests in second language writing and has conducted research into the ontogenetic development of FL writers' genre awareness and knowledge, and its impact on their writing performances and meaning-making choices in a particular rhetorical context. The ultimate goal of her research is to translate her research findings into development of curriculum, pedagogy, materials and tasks so FL learners can optimally improve their academic literacy skills in classroom settings.