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 ABD: Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies, Graduate Certificate in Cognitive Science, University of Connecticut
MA: Chinese Linguistics, University of Macau
BA: Liberal Arts (Longji/Cuiyin honors program), concentration in Chinese Language and Literature, Lanzhou University
Classes Taught
CHNS UN1101 First Year Chinese I
CHNS UN2201 Second Year Chinese N I
Research Interests
Psycholinguistics (speech perception)
Sociolinguistics (sociophonetics)
Second language acquisition (L2 speech)
Language pedagogy (communicative approach and intercultural competence)
Open science and reproducible research practices
Data analysis and visualization
Kaidi Chen joined the Columbia EALAC department as a full-time faculty member in the Fall of 2022. He is a mixed-methods linguist and researcher working at the intersection of speech science, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, bilingualism and language pedagogy. His recent research examines the interplay between bottom-up acoustic 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 experiments, 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 analysis (t-test, ANOVA, correlation, regression, mixed-effects models, etc.). The languages of investigation are primarily Chinese and English.
He has been awarded several competitive national grants/awards, including the Dissertation Grant (ranked among the very best) from Language Learning, a prestigious top journal in linguistics; the Jiede Empirical Research Grant from the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) USA; the Graduate Research Support Grant from the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Association (NFMLTA) and the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL); 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 in the US. 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.