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School of Education

About me:

BA, MPhil, PCAP, PhD

Li Li is Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS). She is responsible for the Faculty’s global strategy, engagement, and activities, including developing global partnerships, enhancing global reputation, leading international student recruitment, and enriching student and staff global experience. Li Li is also Deputy Secretary-General for the UK-China Humanities Alliance, a grouping of some of the best universities in the UK and China, focusing on developing research and connections in the Humanities. She coordinates the work for the Alliance among the member universities in the UK.

Before her role as APVC, she was Associate Dean of Global (ADG) in the College of Social Sciences and International Studies (SSIS). Other leadership roles include Assistant ADG for SSIS, Director of Research, and Director of Global Engagement at the Graduate School of Education.

Li Li has been involved in English language teaching and research for nearly 20 years and has worked in various cultural contexts. Her research areas include teacher cognition, 'applied' conversation analysis, social interaction, thinking skills, and technology-enhanced language learning. She has widely published in these areas. She has founded and is leading international research groups such as THINK Network and the Exeter-Fudan Global Thought Network. The most recent project is a research monograph, Language Teacher Cognition: A Sociocultural Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), which aims to expand the understanding of teacher cognition from a sociocultural perspective, highlighting the significance of 'context' and 'social interaction' in the development of one's knowledge. This book is built on her book Social Interaction and Teacher Cognition (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), which discusses teachers' knowledge, understanding, believing, conceptualizing, and stance-taking using discursive psychology. Her recent project also includes Thinking Skills and Creativity in Second Language Education (Routledge, 2019), and she has also co-edited Routledge Handbook for Researching in Teaching Thinking Skills, which has been sold worldwide. She has a long passion for integrating technology in teaching and learning, and her book on New Technologies and Language Learning (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) is an example of where learning theories meet new technological tools and apps in a language setting. This book has been widely used by researchers, teachers, and teacher trainers. The most recent projects that she has led include an international project funded by ESRC and MOST (Taiwan) investigating the development of second/foreign language teachers' digital literacies across different cultures and an international project on 'Deconolising Curriculum' with Jadavpur University (India) funded by British Council Going Global Scheme.

Outside the university, Li has been invited as guest editor of a prestigious journal, Thinking Skills and Creativity, and serves on the editorial board for Thinking Skills and Creativity and Classroom Discourse. She also serves as a reviewer for prestigious journals in education, applied linguistics, and TESOL. In 2012, she was elected to the British Association for Applied Linguistics Executive Committee. She acted as Seminar co-ordinator until 2019, working closely with Cambridge University Press and Routledge to develop funding schemes to support seminars and research development workshops. Her work is very influential in international contexts. She has been invited by many prestigious universities in China, the UK, Spain, and the USA as a guest speaker and a visiting professor, including Tsinghua University, East China Normal University, Beijing Normal University, the University of Hong Kong, and Chinese University of Political Science and Law in China.

She is a very experienced doctoral supervisor who has successfully supervised 26 PhD projects and currently supervises 11 doctoral students worldwide.

Her article about teachers' beliefs is featured in Taylors and Francis Group what’s trending in language and linguistics? You can read it for free here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19463014.2011.562657#.VPhioC4sp2A

Want to know important issues in using computer-assisted language learning? Read the online article here: http://elt.i21st.cn/article/9610_1.html

If you are interested in developing thinking skills in language education, you might find this white paper useful: Pathways for the development of student's critical thinking in EAP programmes

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0873/e4f8fd0b61ed6722860cf8534e6e72fad418.pdf


Interests:

My research interests include

  • Language teacher cognition
  • Thinking skills
  • Social interaction
  • Technology use in (language) education

I am also interested in mixed methodology and sociocultural theory and welcome research proposals and collaboration in these areas.


Qualifications:
  • PhD in Applied Linguistics and TESOL
  • MPhil in Second Langauge Education Across Cultures
  • BA in English Literature and English Language Teaching
  • PCAP

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