Takako Yoshikawa joined the Department of Japanese Studies at HKU in 1995. Prior to that she taught at educational institutions in China and Bulgaria. Since joining HKU, she has been teaching various language courses as well as interdiciplinary content courses such as Contrastive Linguistics and The Tale of Genji. Her current research interests include the implementation of student’s self-assessment in language learning, contrastive study of discourse strategies of speech acts between Japanese and Cantonese, and acquisition of Japanese sentence ending particles.