Jimin Kahng

Jimin joined the Second Language Studies program in fall 2009. She earned her M.A. in English Language Teaching at the International Graduate School of English in Seoul, Korea. Before she joined the Ph.D. program at MSU, she taught English and Korean language to various student populations in different settings. While working at the English Education Research Institute in Korea, she also led research projects to develop English proficiency standards, curriculum, and tests for over 300,000 English learners in Korea. During her first three years at MSU, Jimin worked as a research assistant for Professors (Debra Hardison, Patti Spinner, Charlene Polio, and Diana Pulido) on various research projects, such as developing measures of second language oral interaction competence, tracking morphosyntactic development in second language, and evaluating measures of linguistic accuracy in L2 writing. Since her fourth academic year, she has been teaching two undergraduate (online and face-to-face) courses—Pedagogical English Grammar and Language Teaching Methods. Jimin has researched a range of issues on SLA and TESOL including the development of English learners’ phonology, oral fluency, and writing. She is currently investigating L2 fluency for her dissertation. For her dissertation she is researching how fluency components (i.e., utterance, cognitive, and perceived) form the multidimensional construct. She has presented her work at recent conferences such as AAAL, EUROSLA, and New Sounds. Jimin also enjoys collaborating with others to conduct research in SLA and linguistics. She collaborated with Charlene Polio and Betsy Lavolette to investigate the feasibility of using computer-assisted feedback on ESL learners’ writing. She has also been conducting multiple research projects on phonology and phonetics with Dr. Durvasula from the MSU linguistics program. Jimin received an MSU Dissertation Completion Fellowship and expects to defend her dissertation in Spring 2014. To read more about Jimin, click here.