Eiko Torii-Williams
Eiko Torii-Williams' teaching career began when she attended the Japanese Teacher's Workshop directed by Professor Eleanor Jorden at the National Foreign Language Center in 1988 and worked as a teaching assistant at Northeast Missouri State University.
In 1989, she was hired as a drill instructor by the Japanese Dept. at Wellesley College and taught introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels. Since 1992, she has been a lecturer and has been teaching the grammatical and cultural aspects of the language for all three levels (including Wintersession), plus occasional independent studies (J350) with students who wish to study advanced readings in Social Science. She has also been participating in curriculum planning and teaching material development as well as supervising drill instructors. For the advanced level course, particularly, she has created some materials for improving oral skills by using a Japanese TV drama and developing a community outreach project, which has provided the students with an opportunity to communicate with Japanese people by visiting Japanese families residing in Wellesley. She also supervised summer digital audio projects for the first year and the second year Japanese courses, which have made it possible for the students to practice oral skills online instead of making visits to a language lab.
In 1993, Ms. Torii-Williams conducted research on Japanese language programs in Japan, and since then, she has been serving as a Department Advisor for Study Abroad in Japan. Since 2002, she has been assisting the Education Department to develop a Japanese Teacher Certificate Program. Last year, the first student went through the program and Ms. Torii-Williams served as a Japanese Subject Teaching Advisor. Outside Wellesley College, Ms. Torii-Williams also taught Japanese Language at Harvard Summer School for six summers and at MIT for two summers. She has also been a World Language Class Coordinator for The Educational Cooperative (TEC), which serves several local-area public school communities.
While teaching full-time at Wellesley, Ms. Torii-Williams received a Masters of Education Degree in Bilingual Education from Boston University in 1992. Throughout her graduate studies, she put great emphasis on exploring and developing ways of teaching Japanese as a foreign language. One of her projects was included in the production of The Many Voices of Bilingual Studies in Massachusetts by Dr. Brisk in 1991.
In 1997, Ms. Torii-Williams returned to school and received a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Boston University in January 2001. Her dissertation, “An Analysis of Japanese ‘Synonymous’ Adverbs and Its Pedagogical Implications,” explores a number of largely unstudied semantic dimensions of adverbs and offers pedagogical materials that are intended to assist learners in acquiring closely related families of adverbs.
Since graduation, Ms. Torii-Williams has been working on many articles derived from her dissertation chapters. She has published eight articles and presented papers at seven conferences. In addition, she has been working on other areas of research, such as Foreign Language Pedagogy, Pragmatics, Computer Assisted Language Learning, and Discourse Analysis—on these areas, she has published three articles and presented papers at eleven conferences. She also has attended many talks and workshops on Linguistics, Language Pedagogy, and Technology to update her knowledge in these areas.
Since 1995, Ms. Torii-Williams has been a manuscript reviewer for the Journal of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL), Foreign Language Annals. She has been a member of several professional organizations, such as The Association of Teachers of Japanese (ATJ), The Association for Asian Studies (AAS), The National Council of Secondary Teachers of Japanese (NCSTJ), and The Northeast Associations of Secondary Teachers of Japanese (NEASTJ).
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Profile last updated: 12/04