Yasuko Kanno
Associate Professor & Chair of the Department of Language & Literacy Education, Wheelock College of Education & Human Development
Dr. Yasuko Kanno is Associate professor of Language Education and Chair of the Department of Language and Literacy Education at Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. She specializes in the education of English language learner (ELL) and works closely with local schools in the Greater Boston area to increase educational opportunities for multilingual learners. A former ELL herself who learned English in a sink-or-swim environment in the United Kingdom, Dr. Kanno interrogates how and why different degrees of proficiency in society’s dominant language translate into differential educational opportunities for multilingual students, especially in terms of their access to higher education.
Her most recent book “English Learners’ Access to Postsecondary Education: Neither College nor Career Ready” (Multilingual Matters, 2021) is an ethnographic case study that takes the reader on a journey with seven ELLs through their last two years of high school, exploring how and why their education was institutionally diminished in such a way that none of them reached the postsecondary destinations to which they originally aspired. Dr. Kanno is the recipient of the 2015 TESOL Distinguished Research Award.