Tomoko Shibata was appointed Japanese language lecturer in 2005. Her specialization areas are Japanese pedagogy, Second Language Acquisition, Phonology, and Psycholinguistics. Her current research topic is prosody acquisition of Japanese as a second language. Before joining Princeton University, she taught Japanese courses at Princeton in Ishikawa program. She also taught Japanese courses for several years at the University of Iowa as a full-time instructor and a teaching assistant.