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 I
CHNS UN2201 Second Year Chinese N I

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 Analysis and Visualization

Kaidi Chen joined Columbia University as a full-time faculty member in the fall of 2022. He received his PhD in Applied Linguistics and a Graduate Certificate in Cognitive Science from the University of Connecticut (UConn).
He was also a PhD trainee at the Spoken Language Processing (SlaP) Lab in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and was affiliated with the Connecticut Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences at UConn. His research interests are broadly at the intersection of speech science, psycholinguistics, bilingualism, sociolinguistics and language pedagogy. Trained as a phonetician and psycholinguist, 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, regression, mixed-effects models, and Bayesian frameworks. He primarily examines these issues in the contexts of English and Chinese.

He has been awarded several competitive 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 contributed to
the book Snapshots: Mini-Stories for Beginning Chinese, which complements IC with extended reading materials and practice activities highlighting cross-cultural interactions. 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 Summer Language School, and teaching assistant at the University of Connecticut and the University of Macau.