Biography
Yumi Matsumoto is an expert on English as a lingua franca — a shared language used among speakers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. She is interested in how multilingual speakers, specifically multilingual international students at U.S. universities, use multimodal communicative resources — such as gestures, laughter, and materials — to resolve miscommunication and to communicate and learn content in the classroom.
Yumi Matsumoto is an applied linguist and second language teacher educator. In her research and teaching, she examines and illustrates the interactional strategies of so-called non-native English speakers that enable them to communicate successfully in multilingual, intercultural contexts. Her primary area of expertise is English as a lingua franca (ELF), an interactional practice in which interlocutors from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds use English as a tool for communication in intercultural contexts. Before getting her Ph.D. in applied linguistics from Pennsylvania State University, she taught English as a foreign language at secondary schools in Japan for about five years.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Matsumoto’s major research interests include ELF pragmatics, intercultural communication, gestures and second language learning/development, and humor construction. In her doctoral dissertation, entitled Multimodal Communicative Strategies for Resolving Miscommunication in Multilingual Writing Classrooms, she developed a multimodal orientation to the conceptualization of ELF by conducting multimodal analysis of ELF academic discourse. Her primary objectives in this area of research are to (a) illuminate how multilingual students and instructors use miscommunication as a space for negotiating understanding and differences; (b) develop an alternative, positive view of multilingual speakers and interactional competence; and (c) uncover the pedagogical implications of this work for (language) teacher education inside the U.S. and at a global level.
Dr. Matsumoto also investigates the roles of various multimodal interactional resources in second language classroom interactions, including student and teacher use of gestures, other embodied actions (e.g., gaze and body posture), laughter/smile, and language learning and teaching materials. Employing linguistic ethnography as methodology, she closely analyzes how students and teachers in multilingual classroom contexts coordinate multimodal interactional resources for learning and teaching, and how those resources can contribute to achieving understanding among students and teachers and thus lead to students’ second language development. Her goals in this research area are to demonstrate the complex process by which students and teachers engage in classroom interactions and to examine the possible relationship between students’ actions in classroom interactions and L2 development/learning longitudinally.
Dr. Matsumoto is currently investigating multilingual students’ materials use (especially smartphones and other mobile technology devices) for their own communicative and learning purposes, underscoring learner agency. Most recently, Dr. Matsumoto has started conducting linguistic landscape research in Kyoto, Japan, examining how COVID-19–related signage illuminates the emergence of the new, unique discourse situated in a particular time and space during the pandemic.
Dr. Matsumoto is the principal investigator of a study titled “International Students’ Communicative Practice in U.S. University Classrooms: Multimodal Analyses of Multilinguals’ Communicative Repertoires." This project, which was awarded The National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Small Grant, examines multilingual international students’ communicative practice in content-focused classrooms at a U.S. university through a multilingual lens, particularly from English as a lingua franca perspectives. This study also explores multilingual international students’ and university instructors’ perceptions of classroom interactional norms, their understanding of what kinds of English language use (e.g., varieties of English, other languages) are considered appropriate, and whether or not multilingualism is valued in classrooms.
Journal Editorial Boards
Classroom Discourse
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