Aiko Otsuka joined King’s College London Language Centre in 2019. She completed her BA in English Literature at Meiji Gakuin University, Japan (1993), and her MA in Applied Linguistics and Language Pedagogy (2014) and her PhD in Linguistics (2025) at SOAS University of London. She is also qualified with the Japanese Language Teaching Competency Test and holds a Japanese–Japanese Sign Language interpreter license. She speaks Japanese, English, and Japanese Sign Language.

Aiko is a lecturer with extensive experience teaching Japanese in the higher education sector in the UK since 2015. Prior to joining King’s, she taught Japanese at the University of Manchester and SOAS University of London.

At King’s, Aiko teaches Language Modules, Short Courses, Doctoral Training Programme courses, tailor-made courses, and other external partnership courses across all levels. 

Research, Scholarly projects and Academic Awards

Aiko's research interests include pragmatics, speech act realisation, second language socialisation, and second language users’ linguistic identities. She is actively involved in several scholarly projects that reflect these interests.

Academic Publications:

Otsuka, A. (2021) Deaf Japanese Sign Language users’ use of Japanese and their experience of learning and using Japanese as a second language, Acquisition of Japanese as a Second Language, 24, pp. 12–29.

Otsuka, A. & Iwasaki, N. (2018) A Deaf person’s life story: Mobility and language for the Deaf [Kokkyō o koeta rōsha - Aru rōsha no raifu stōrī], in Kawakami, I., Miyake, K. & Iwasaki, N. (eds.) Mobility and language [Idō to Kotoba]. Tokyo: Kroshio Publishers.