My name is Yaqiong Cui. I received my B.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language at East China Normal University, Shanghai. In 2009, I began my studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for my M.A. degree, focusing on Chinese linguistics, and the second language acquisition and processing of Chinese. At the same time, I also taught Chinese at different levels to U of I undergraduates. I joined the SLS program in Fall 2012. I defended my dissertation in spring 2018, and will take up a tenure-tracked lecturer position in a Chinese university in the fall.

During my times in the SLS program, I had opportunities to explore various areas in the fields of applied linguistics and second language acquisition. My research interests range from second language acquisition of Chinese, sentence processing in second language, eye-movement research, language policy and planning, to language education for linguistic minorities.

For my QRPs, I conducted (a) a qualitative study on the willingness-to-communicate variable within Chinese graduate students in the US, and (b) an eye-movement research study on Chinese L2 learners’ reading of spaced and unspaced texts. My recent research has centered around the language education of Uyghur ethnic minorities in China. My dissertation explores Uyghur women’s learning of Chinese and English in a mainstream university in China, and how their identities are (re)shaped and negotiated as they acquire Chinese and English. This study built on earlier collaborative work with Dr. Peter De Costa and a Chinese scholar. Two articles on our work were published in Current Issues in Language Planning and Language Policy.

During my years in the SLS Program, I worked as a research assistant for Dr. Peter De Costa in examining the academic socialization of Chinese international students in the US, and the language education of ethnic minorities in China. With Dr. Xiaoshi Li I worked on the variational use of the perfective aspect marker LE in Chinese. I also participated several research projects. I worked with Dr. Paula Winke and several SLS students on the validity of child English-language tests with a grant from Cambridge Michigan Language Assessment, and the paper was published online first in 2017 in TESOL Quarterly. I also participated an eye-tracking project with Dr. Aline Godfroid and a group of SLS fellows on incidental vocabulary acquisition through novel reading, and the article was published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition in 2017. I also helped to maintain the Chinese Help Room for the Center for Language Education and Research and the Center for Language Teaching Advancement, where I got to know many talented and motivated language learners. I’m grateful for the professional training and support that I received from the SLS program. All these experiences have helped me grow academically, and will have lifelong influences on my future career as a language educator and researcher.