Tomoko Iwai is an instructor (B) of Japanese at University of Hawai‘i at Manoa (UHM). Her areas of specialization are language pedagogy and pragmatics. She received her doctorate in Japanese linguistics from UHM with a dissertation, Becoming a good conversationalist: Conversational competence as a target of JFL instruction. She is a 2011 recipient of Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. She is a co-author of Musubi: a new approach to Japanese language and culture, vol. 1 to 4 (2017-2022), a textbook currently used for JPN101, 102, 201, and 202 at UHM. She also co-authored Japanese for Oral Communication (2000), the textbook that was used at UHM in the oral communication track. She has chaired the Japanese Curriculum Review Committee in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at UHM and is a member of Upper Level Curriculum Review Committee at present. She was an assistant director and co-instructor of the Japanese Summer Institute in 2002 and 2003 (cosponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies and National Foreign Language Resource Center). Before coming to Hawai‘i, she taught at the University of the Philippines and Universiti Malaya as a Japan Foundation Japanese-language specialist.
