Masako Cook teaches all the Japanese classes offered at UAB. She is a graduate of Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan, with a BA in English literature. Beginning in 1990, Masako taught Japanese to high school students by telephone in the SERC Japanese distance learning program from Nebraska Educational Television. She also appeared in live satellite TV lessons of that program as an on-air assistant and wrote TV lessons for the second-year course. Her other distance learning experience was writing curriculum and scripts for Irasshai, a Japanese program produced by Georgia Public Broadcasting. For her scriptwriting for Irasshai, she was nominated for a Southern Regional Emmy in 1997. Masako's first experience teaching Japanese face to face was in 1998 at Mori-no-Ike, the Japanese village of Concordia Language Villages, a summer immersion program in northern Minnesota. At a Japanese supplemental school on the campus of the University of Alabama, she taught Japanese as a native language to Japanese children. While there, she also taught noncredit Japanese courses to members of the community at the Japan Information and Culture Center.
Foreign Languages and Literatures at UAB
