Tohoku University
Graduate School of International Cultural Studies
41 Kawauchi, Aoba-ku, Sendai
Miyagi 980-8576, Japan
Email: ryo.maie.e5(at.sign)tohoku.ac.jp

Bio

Hello! My name is Ryo Maie, and I’m currently Senior Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies at Tohoku University (Ph.D. in Second Language Studies from Michigan State University). Please follow the menu above for more details about me and my work.

I am originally from Ibaraki Prefecture of Japan, located in the northeastern part of the Kanto region (Tokyo is in this region too). I grew up in a small rural city named Omitama (used to be a town named Ogawa till 2006) with a dialect that is characterized by a moderate accent and a particular variety of vocabulary.

Before joining the SLS program, I completed my master’s degree in Second Language Acquisition at University of Maryland, College Park, bachelor’s degree at Kanda University of International Studies in Japan, and study abroad at Dartmouth College. Please visit my CV page for more details. You can also access my researchmap page from here.

Research Interests

My research deals with cognitive psychology of second language acquisition, which means I’m interested in psychological mechanisms of how people acquire a second language (L2) and how the knowledge about the process and mechanism of learning can be applied to classroom instruction. I place the premium on practice, defined as “specific activities in the second language, engaged in systematically, deliberately, with the goals of developing knowledge of and skills in the second language” (DeKeyser, 2007, p.1), and hence echo with Lightbown (2019, p.704) when she claims “practice is the only way to make perfect, but the challenge is to understand what kind of practice will lead learners closer to that goal”. My research investigates how people (esecically adults) develop accuracy and fluency as they deliberately and systematically practice using the L2 and how we teachers can better enhance their learning by optimizing the condition of practice. My doctoral dissertation study titled Testing the three-stage model of second language skill acquisition has been awarded the NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (please see here for details). This study puts to a test the influential three-stage model of second language skill acquisition. I utilize statistical and cognitive modeling of practice data to test the validity of the model in L2 learning contexts.

In addition, I have worked on (a) explicit and implicit learning, (b) language aptitudes, (c) monitoring processes, (d) task-based language teaching, and (e) applied statistics in language research.