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 speech scientist and experimental linguist, his 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 also studies second language speech intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness. 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 analyses and regression models (linear or logistic, with or without random effects), estimated 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 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Dissertation Award (Finalist); the Language Learning Dissertation Grant (ranked among the very best); 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 over 10 scholarly and pedagogical works, including books, edited volumes, peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. He 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.