Kaidi Chen

Lecturer in Chinese

Office: 501 Kent Hall
Office Hours: MTW 5:10 -6:10 PM
Phone: (212) 854-5038
Email: kc3640@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD, University of Connecticut

Classes Taught

CHNS UN1101 First Year Chinese N
CHNS UN2201 Second Year Chinese N

Research Interests

Phonetics and Speech Science
Psycholinguistics (speech perception)
Second Language Acquisition (second language speech)
Sociolinguistics (sociophonetics)
Language Pedagogy (pronunciation training; communicative approach and
intercultural competence)
Open Science and Reproducible Research Practices
Data Visualization and Statistical Analysis

Kaidi Chen joined Columbia University as a full-time faculty member in the
fall of 2022. He earned a Doctorate in Applied Linguistics and a Graduate
Certificate in Cognitive Science from the University of Connecticut. He was a
Predoctoral Research Trainee at the Spoken Language Processing (SlaP) Lab,
which is affiliated with the Connecticut Institute for Brain and Cognitive
Sciences and the renowned Haskins Laboratories. His research interests are
broadly at the intersection of speech science, psycholinguistics, bilingualism,
sociolinguistics and language pedagogy. Trained as a phonetician and
experimental linguist, his recent research investigates the interplay between
bottom-up acoustic-phonetic cues and top-down semantic cues, as well as
individual differences in spoken word recognition in both native and non-
native speech. He mainly employs behavior experiment, survey methodology
and computational modeling and simulation for studies on human speech. He
utilizes R programming to visualize data and perform both descriptive and

inferential statistical analyses, most often including t-tests, ANOVA,
correlation and regression models (linear, logistic and mixed-effects) applied
within both frequentist and Bayesian frameworks. He primarily examines
these issues in the contexts of English and Chinese.

He has been awarded several prestigious national grants/awards, including
the Dissertation Grant (ranked among the very best) from Language
Learning; the Dissertation Writing Support Grant from the National
Federation of Modern Language Teachers Association (NFMLTA) and the
Modern Language Journal (MLJ); the Graduate Research Support Grant from
the NFMLTA and the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages
(NCOLCTL); the Jiede Empirical Research Grant from the Chinese Language
Teachers Association (CLTA) USA; and a collaborative Level I Digital
Humanities Advancement Grant (DHAG) from the National Endowment for
the Humanities (NEH). He has published (including editing) over 10 book
chapters, peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings, and has
presented widely at regional, national and international conferences across
various strands in the field.

He is also an experienced language educator who is dedicated to real-world
pedagogical innovations. As a core collaborator of the NEH grant project
titled “An Engaging Digital Curriculum for Intermediate Chinese Language
and Culture”, he primarily focused on the implementation of intercultural
communicative competence and intercultural citizenship in the Chinese
language classroom. He is one of the contributors to the book Teaching
Beginning Chinese Grammar: Communicative Strategies and Activities, which
serves as a teacher’s handbook accompanying the most widely used Chinese
language textbook Integrated Chinese (IC) in the US. He also co-authored the
book series Snapshots: Mini-Stories for Beginning Chinese, a collection of
original fictional stories — 16 in Volume 1 and 20 in Volume 2. The series
complements IC with extended reading materials and practice activities
highlighting cross-cultural interactions for learners at the novice to
intermediate levels. He has extensive experience in teaching all levels of
Chinese language/culture, as well as domain-specific language/culture
courses (e.g., Contemporary Chinese Film and Business Chinese). Prior to
Columbia, he taught as instructor/lecturer at Allegheny College, Trinity
College, and Middlebury College (Summer Language School), and teaching
assistant at the University of Connecticut and the University of Macau.