Professor, Boston University
Dr. Yasuko (“Yasko”) Kanno is a professor of language education at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. She is an applied linguist who specializes in immigrant English learners’ access to postsecondary education. A multilingual speaker who has lived in four different countries, Dr. Kanno interrogates how the US K–12 schools systemically marginalize multilingual students of color and works closely with local schools in the Greater Boston to promote educational equity for this population. She is an ethnographer by training and teaches qualitative research at BU Wheelock; however, she also occasionally engages in secondary data analysis.
Before arriving at Boston University, Dr. Kanno was an associate professor and program coordinator of the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program at Temple University. Her book, English Learners’ Access to Postsecondary Education: Neither College nor Career Ready (Multilingual Matters, 2021), is an ethnographic case study that explores seven ELs’ transition from high school to postsecondary education. Dr. Kanno is an editorial board member of the American Educational Research Journal and a member at large of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. She was the recipient of the 2015 TESOL Distinguished Research Award.
Pronouns: she/her
