Yuka Naito Billen

Yuka Naito has studied foreign language education and linguistics, with a focus on Japanese. She earned MA in TESL (2006), Master’s in Music Education (2007), and Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction (2012) from the University of Kansas. Her research interests include Japanese pedagogy, second language acquisition, Japanese mimetics, Japanese pronunciation and prosody, and Japanese sentence processing.

She has been teaching and supervising all levels of Japanese language courses at KU. Previously, she taught Japanese language and culture courses at Washburn University and Kansas City Japanese School.