Professor Dongbo Zhang

About me:

I am an applied linguist and Professor of Language Education in the School of Education. I previously held appointments at Michigan State University (USA), Nanyang Technology University (Singapore), and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China).

Interests:

An applied linguist by training, I am primarily interested in vocabulary knowledge and reading development in second language (L2) or bilingual learners. Over the past years, I have collaborated with colleagues and students to examine various issues related to this strand of interest, such as the metalinguistic underpinnings of word learning and reading (e.g., Zhang, 2013, 2017a, 2017b; Zhang, Koda, & Leong, 2016) and the lexical foundation of reading comprehension (e.g., Zhang, 2012; Zhang & Yang, 2016). To unravel the complexity of L2 reading development, my research has taken a cross-linguistic perspective, examining how learners’ metalinguistic resources, such as morphological awareness, can be transferred from one language to facilitate their development of reading and its related skills in the other language. More recently, I have developed a strong interest in the multidimensionality of vocabulary knowledge and its implications for textual comprehension. In particular, I aim to find out how different dimensions of vocabulary knowledge and the efficiency of accessing them function in L2 readers’ reading of different types of texts and for different reading purposes.

A secondary strand of my research focuses on the relationships between language teacher cognition (Borg, 2006) and teachers’ classroom practices. So far I have collaborated with colleagues and students to look at two major issues related to this strand of research: language teachers’ technology adoption (e.g., Liu, Lin, & Zhang, 2017; Liu, Lin, Zhang, & Zheng, 2017) and assessment literacy (Gu, Teng, Yang, & Zhang, 2019).

Although multiple approaches have been adopted in my research to address the complexity of issues related to language learners and teachers, my research is primarily cognitive and quantitative and involves using multivariate statistical methods such as Structural Equation Modeling to document the complex relationships between variables.

I welcome emails from prospective students to discuss interest in studying in GSE’s PhD in Education programme. Those who have had rigorous theoretical and methodological training in psychology of language/reading are particularly welcome to contact me and discuss interests.

Qualifications:

PhD in Second Language Acquisition, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)

MA in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Jilin University (China)