Naoko MORITA

From Precis

Naoko Morita was born and raised in Japan and speaks Japanese as her first language. She has taught English and Japanese as a foreign language at the secondary and postsecondary level in Japan and Canada. She received her doctorate in TESL from the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia.

Her research interests include academic discourse socialization, sociocultural and critical theories on language learning, identity and gender in language learning, and classroom discourse research. She developed these interests partly from her own experience of participating in new academic communities in Canada as a second language graduate student from Japan and becoming socialized into new discursive and interactional practices. This journey led her to problematize individualistic premises about language learning and instead to explore the social construction of language learning and academic participation.

Her doctoral dissertation examined how language learners negotiate their participation, identity, and power relations in their new academic communities. Her 2004 article in TESOL Quarterly based on this research received TESOL’s Thomson Heinle Distinguished Research Award.