Rika Ito
Associate Professor of Japanese and Linguistics
St Olaf College
Northfield, MN 55057 USA
(507) 786- 3637
ito@stolaf.edu
Click here for Rika's Home Page
Professor Ito earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Michigan State University, and her B.A. in English from Hokusei Gakuen University, Sapporo, Japan. She is an active member of the Linguistic Program at St. Olaf. She enjoys her various roles - teaching Japanese (all levels), coordinating the Japanese Program, mentoring students, and doing research in sociolinguistics. She has been involved in student-faculty research for the last several years. Her work includes phonological change in American English (Northern Cities Vowel Shift) in rural Michigan, morpho-syntactic variation in British English, discourse analysis in Japanese, and variation in self-reference terms in Japanese children's speech. She has been analyzing Hmong-American English in the Twin Cities, MN, and her article was recently published in American Speech. She is also interested in incorporating academic civic engagement in her teaching. She taught a topic course on Asian American Experiences through the American Racial and Multicultural Studies Program (ARMS) in the spring of 2010. Her students conducted oral history projects with 6 local Asian Americans in Northfield. She is going to teach ASIAN300: East Asian Languages and Linguistics in the spring of 2011.
