Professor Jin, Faculty of Arts and Humanities from University of Macau, visited the Language Expertise STE on February 9, 2018. Professor Jin’s primary research interests include cognitive processing of languages, first and second language acquisition, input, interaction, and output analyses, foreign language curricular design, and teacher development. In the last 25 years of her career, she has published 3 books on language acquisition, 3 sets of textbooks for CFL learners, and 24 research articles in professional and referred journals on second language acquisition and learning Chinese as a foreign language. Jin has also conducted numerous nation-wide workshops on teacher development and curricular design in the US, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China.
Professor Jin held a lunch roundtable workshop and an STE session during which she talked about cognitive processing of languages. She introduced the theory of learning in linguistic clusters, also known as “chunks” and how those chunks are acquired when learning a second language. She emphasized the importance of pedagogies supporting chunk learning to reach better student learning outcomes.
