Amy Snyder Ohta (she/her/hers)

Current Research Projects:

With my colleagues Kyoko Masuda and Rie Tsujihara, I have a recently published book entitled Concept-Based Language Instruction (Routledge), and with another coauthor we are working on a Japanese book (Hitsuji Shobo Press) that builds on the research of our English book. During my sabbatical, I have worked on these projects along with autoethnographic work on my learning of Korean.

Selected Bibliography

• Masuda, Kyoko, Ohta, Amy Snyder and Tsujihara, Rie (2025) Concept-Based Language Instruction: Usage-based linguistics and Sociocultural theory in teaching Japanese. Routledge.
• Mori, Junko and Ohta, Amy Snyder (Eds.) (2008). Japanese Applied Linguistics: Discourse and Social Perspectives. London: Continuum.
• Ohta, Amy Snyder (2001). Second Language Acquisition Processes in the Classroom: Learning Japanese (316 pages). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Ohta, Amy Snyder (2025). Sociocultural theory and zone of proximal development activity. In Julia Herschensohn and Ana Fernández Dobao and Alex Ho-Cheong Leung (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press.
• Ohta, Amy Snyder (2024). Sociocultural theory and L2 discourse: From descriptive to interventionist research in SLA. In Brian Paltridge and Matthew T. Prior (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Discourse,116-131. New York: Routledge.
• Ohta, Amy Snyder (2023). “Casual Friday”: Organizational change, TA development, and languaculture learning in an advanced-beginning multi-section Japanese language course. Language & Sociocultural Theory, 10(1), 21-49.
• Masuda, Kyoko, & Ohta, Amy Snyder (2021). Teaching subjective construal and related constructions with SCOBAs: Concept learning as a foundation for Japanese language development. Language & Sociocultural Theory, 8(1), 35-67.(Equal co-authors: names in alpha order)
• Ohta, Amy Snyder (2020). Increasing Diversity of Japanese Language Teachers: Approaches to Teaching-Related Professional Development for College Students in North America.  Japanese Language and Literature, 54(2), 399-414
• Ohta, Amy Snyder & Prior, Matthew (2019) “That’s a Stupid Question!”: Managing Competing Perspectives and Language Choice in a Japanese-English Bilingual Research Interview. In Kathy Roulston (ed), Social Studies of Qualitative Interviewing: Unpacking Research Methods (pp. 147-179). John Benjamins.
• Ohta, Amy Snyder & Masuda, Kyoko (2018). Future directions for informed language pedagogy from cognitive linguistics. In Kyoko Masuda (Ed). Cognitive Linguistics and Japanese Pedagogy Usage-Based Approaches to Language Learning and Instruction (pp. 305-321). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
• Ohta, Amy Snyder (2017). Conceptualizing and teaching Japanese addressee honorifics as expressing modes of self: From SCOBA development to instructional implementation. Language & Sociocultural Theory, 4(2), 187-218.
• Ohta, Amy Snyder (2016). Sociocultural Theory and Second/Foreign Language Education. In Second and Foreign Language Education, ed. by Nelleke van Deusen-Scholl & Stephen May. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. New York: Springer. Doi 10.1007/ 978-3-319-02323-6_6-1