Dr. Maayan Barkan is currently serving as the director of the Japanese Program at Hunter College, where she has been teaching Japanese language courses since 2007. She has completed her doctorate in linguistics at the Graduate Center (CUNY) in May, 2018. Most Recent publication and presentation: The important role of pragmatic strategies in L2 Japanese teaching and learning, published in the 24th Princeton Japanese Pedagogy Forum (PJPF)’ proceedings (2018), and Experimental design: Methods for investigating main-clause omission in Japanese and Hebrew, a paper presented at the International Pragmatic Association Conference in Hong Kong (2019). Dr. Barkan is serving as a Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program interviewer at the Consulate General of Japan. She is a recipient of the Innovation in Language Education (ILE) Grant from the CUNY Graduate Centre in 2019-2020.