Invited Panels
ZhaoHong Han, Teachers College, Columbia University
Plenary Title: Learner Spontaneous Processing of Input
Bio
ZhaoHong Han (Ph.D., Birkbeck College, University of London) is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests lie, broadly, in second language learnability and the interface of second language acquisition and second language teaching. Among her published works are: articles that appeared in a variety of journals and books in applied linguistics and second language education and sole-authored/edited/co-edited books, including Fossilization in Adult Second Language Acquisition (2004), Studies of Fossilization in Second Language Acquisition (2006), and Understanding Second Language Process (2008). She is the recipient of the 2003 International TESOL Heinle and Heinle Distinguished Research Award, and a multi-time recipient of the Teachers College, Columbia University Outstanding Teaching Award. In addition to research and teaching, she develops teacher education programs. Her recent effort has led to the setting up of the Certificate Program in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (TCSOL) at Columbia University. She has lived and taught in China, Italy, Norway, United Kingdom (Scotland, England), Japan, and Spain.
Carmen Pérez Vidal, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Plenary Title: The role of stay abroad and language development of non-primary languages
Bio
Carmen Pérez Vidal (Ph.D., Universitat de Barcelona) is associate professor of English in the Department of Translation and Interpretation at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona (Spain). Her research interests lie in the field of language acquisition, bilingualism and multilingualism, with a special focus on foreign language, immersion, and Stay Abroad (SA) contexts. She has pioneered research on the linguistic impact of SA periods in Spain, as the PI of two state funded projects since 2004 (The SALA-COLE), and of the Official Research Group (ALLENCAM).
Pérez Vidal has investigated the Age Factor (within the BAF Project, UB), and oral and written Interlanguage development. She has published in journals such as Journal of Child Language and Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, has been involved in several European funded projects (The ELC-TNP, the CLIL Compendium, and the ALPME project, which she coordinated) and is currently a member of the Scientific Committee of the MOLAN network. More recently, she was a leading editor of the book "A portrait of the young in the new multilingual Spain", and is co-author of the officially validated Spanish European Language Portfolio (12-18). In 1999, she established the Language Center at UPF and was its director until her current appointment as Vice-President for Language Policy.
John N. Williams & Patrick Rebuschat, University of Cambridge, UK
Plenary Title: Statistical Learning and Language Acquisition
Bio
John Williams graduated in Psychology at the University of Durham then went on to do doctoral research at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge. His doctoral research concerned semantic processing during spoken language comprehension. He then spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Padova, Italy. He worked as an English language assistant at the University of Florence for one year before taking up his present post at the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics in Cambridge. His research interests are in bilingual lexical and syntactic processing, and the cognitive mechanisms of second language acquisition, with special emphasis on implicit learning.
Patrick Rebuschat recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. In his doctoral research, he investigated the implicit learning of natural language syntax, i.e. how humans come to acquire syntactic knowledge incidentally and without awareness of the information they have acquired. In addition to his interest in implicit learning processes, Patrick has also been conducting research on the cognitive basis of language and music. He is currently preparing - together with M. Rohrmeier, J. Hawkins and I. Cross - an edited volume on Language and Music as Cognitive Systems, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. His other research interests include Artificial Grammar Learning, the role of grammatical complexity in learning, and connectionist modelling of language acquisition.