Dr. Akira Murakami, PhD
Colleges, School and Institutes
External positions
, Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, RIKEN
16 Oct 2018 → …University of Tübingen
1 Oct 2017 → 31 Mar 2018UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
22 Oct 2015 → 12 Apr 2017Biography
I was born and grew up in Osaka, Japan, and since then have lived in Chicago (1999-2002), Tokyo (2003-2009, 2017, 2018), Cambridge (2010-2013, 2015-2017), Tübingen (2017-2018), and Birmingham (2013-2015, 2018-present). In my undergraduate study, I majored in English and studied second language acquisition (SLA), TEFL, and bilingualism, among other things. During my MA, I put a special emphasis on the use of corpora in TEFL research, and my master's dissertation was a corpus-based study on the comparison of English textbooks used in Asian countries. In my PhD research, I combined my interests in SLA and corpus linguistics. More specifically, I investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of English grammatical morphemes based on large-scale learner corpora and identified both systematicity and individuality in their accuracy development.
Prior to joining Birmingham in August 2018, I worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge, and Tübingen. In Birmingham, I worked for the ESRC-funded project, ‘Interdisciplinary Research Discourse: the case of Global Environmental Change’, and was primarily responsible for the management, processing, and quantitative analysis of corpus data. In Cambridge, I was in the EF Education First Research Lab for Applied Language Learning and investigated L2 development of linguistic complexity and accuracy. During my brief stay in Tübingen, I was in LEAD Graduate School and Research Network and the ICALL research group, where I deepened my knowledge in computational linguistic approaches to the analysis of learner language.
Research interests
My main research interests are in second language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and quantitative data analysis. I am particularly interested in systematicity and individuality in second language development. To characterize language development at the level of individual learners, it is essential to target a large number of learners, and for this reason, my work has exclusively drawn on large-scale learner corpora. To gain insights from such corpora, I have employed a variety of statistical and computational techniques.
Education/Academic qualification
Doctor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
5 Jan 2010 - 31 Jul 2013Master of Arts, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Linguistics (TESOL)
1 Apr 2007 - 27 Mar 2009Bachelor of Arts, Sophia University
English Studies
1 Apr 2003 - 22 Mar 2007
Willingness to take PhD students
Yes
PhD projects
I am keen to supervise PhD research on topics at the interface between corpus linguistics (particularly learner corpus research) and second language acquisition. Please get in touch if you are interested in working with me.