My interest in language developed through my early years of living abroad in Israel and in the U.S. I experienced both day-to-day challenges and achievements during such time in acquiring Hebrew and English. That early experience always lingered on after I came back to South Korea, where I got to see the intense impact that learning foreign languages (especially English) had on a whole range of people. What really struck me was that the end goal for such learning was likely to relate to tests; language was not only a subject of learning, but also that of a gateway for further education and career. This was something that I had not experienced or realized living abroad, and I found myself wanting to learn more about it.

With that interest, I majored in English Education in both college and graduate school, and it was during my master’s studies that I was able to specifically shape my research interest: language assessment. This area made more sense to me as I took courses and wrote my master’s thesis on it. I finally set out to pursue a doctoral degree, and was fortunate enough to join the SLS program here at MSU in the August of 2013. My primary interest in assessment deepened as I navigated through my first three years in the program during which I was able to participate in various research projects alongside Dr. Paula Winke and Dr. Susan Gass. I worked on grant-funded test-validation studies on both children and college-level students by using eye-tracking methodologies; all of these projects helped me gain insights in conducting research with participants with different characteristics and needs. In particular, while working for the Language Proficiency Flagship Initiative, I was able to gain practical experiences in varying aspects and processes of large-scale test administration from test proctoring to dissembling the results to various stakeholders. 

I became a doctoral candidate in March and am currently finalizing data collection for my dissertation in South Korea. My dissertation is a combination of my primary interests in language assessment: testing practices and speaking performance. Specifically, I am investigating the effectiveness of varying levels of pre-task planning conditions on speech production in conduction to task characteristics. I hope to defend my dissertation in the spring of 2017.