Yasuko Kanno

Yasuko (Yasko) Kanno is a professor of language education and chair ad interim of the Language & Literacy Education Department at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. She was an associate professor and program coordinator of the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program at Temple University. An applied linguist, she specializes in immigrant English learners’ (ELs) access to postsecondary education and examines how K–12 schools systemically marginalize multilingual students of color. A multilingual speaker who has lived in four countries, she works closely with local schools in the Greater Boston area to promote educational equity for multilingual students. An ethnographer by training, she teaches qualitative research at BU Wheelock and engages in secondary data analysis. She serves on the editorial board of the American Educational Research Journal and is a member at large of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. Kanno earned her MA in linguistics from Keio University and her PhD in education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

updated 2025