Naoko Nemoto

Associate Professor of Japanese

Specialization: Linguistics; Japanese language

Naoko Nemoto is teaching at the Associated Kyoto Program, Kyoto, Japan for three semesters from the spring semester of 2005 to the spring semester of 2006.

The Associated Kyoto Program (AKP) is an official study abroad program for Mount Holyoke students; it is ideally located at Doshisha University Imadegawa Campus, right across from the former Imperial Palace in Kyoto. During the academic year of 2005-6, Nemoto is serving as the program's resident director. She also teaches Japanese linguistics and the AKP-Doshisha Joint Seminar.

Nemoto's research interests include syntax, semantics, comparative linguistics, and language pedagogy. She is currently conducting research on number (for example, the singular/plural distinction) in East Asian languages. Nemoto contributed a chapter entitled "Scrambling" to The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics (Blackwell Publishers, 1999), based on her Ph.D. dissertation, and her article "On Mass Denotations of Bare Nouns in Japanese and Korean" will be published in Linguistics in 2005.

At Mount Holyoke, Nemoto teaches first- and second-year Japanese courses and directs the Japanese Language Program. She has also served on the board of the AKP since 1999. In 2002 and 2003, Nemoto was accepted into the National Foreign Language Resource Center's summer institute, Pragmatics in the Japanese as a Foreign Language Classroom. She has been the recipient of a fellowship from the National Resource Center for East Asia at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Before coming to Mount Holyoke, Nemoto was an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She has also taught summer intensive Japanese language courses in Japan, most recently for Princeton-in-Ishikawa, Kanazawa, Japan.

Nemoto's teaching philosophy is to enhance learners' interpersonal and intercultural communication skills via foreign language learning.