Dr
Keisuke
Honda
Academic biography
Keisuke Honda is a Research Assistant in Multilingualism in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS) at Dublin City University, Ireland. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, and specialises in the linguistic and pedagogical aspects of the Japanese writing system. Keisuke teaches Japanese as a foreign language in the Language and Culture Programme as part of the DCU Futures project.
Keisuke's expertise is in grapholinguistics, the linguistic study of scripts and writing systems. He has published and presented widely on the linguistic aspects of the Japanese writing system as well as the contrastive analysis of Japanese and other typologically related writing systems. He is an active contributor and reviewer for the journal Association for Written Language and Literacy. He is also currently serving as a programme committee member for the Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century conference.
Japanese language education also occupies a central place in Keisuke's academic career. Before coming to DCU in 2022, he worked in UK higher education for 10 years, teaching the language at Oxford Brookes University, Imperial College London, and the University of Oxford. In recognition of his engaging teaching, he was nominated for a Student Academic Choice Award by the Imperial College Students Union in 2019 and was presented with an Oxford University Recognition Award in 2022.
Research interests
Keisuke's primary research area is grapholinguistics, with a particular focus on the linguistic and pedagogical aspects of the Japanese writing system (kanji, hiragana, katakana, rÅmaji).
As a linguist, he studies the way in which linguistic properties are related to graphical elements under the Japanese writing system. He also explores the implications of this relationship from typological and theoretical perspectives, analysing the similarities and differences between Japanese and other writing systems of the world. His main research interests include the formation and uses of Japanese written signs, the interface between logo/morphography and phonography, and the taxonomy of writing systems.
As a language teacher, Keisuke also looks into how to facilitate learning and teaching the Japanese language and its writing system. He has a strong interest in the relationship between Japanese character learning and vocabulary knowledge, the development of recognition and production skills in Japanese written words, and language teachers' beliefs and attitudes towards the Japanese writing system.
His other research interests also include Japanese neologisms, lexical variety in Japanese child-directed speech, the 'Yamanote kotoba' sociolect in Tokyo Japanese, phonetics and phonology, morphology and word-formation, and the Japanese linguistic landscape.