Visiting Scholar
School of Education
January 1, 2009
Recipient of Second Fulbright Award to UC System is Chair of National Taichung University Department of English
Professor Meei-Ling Liaw is a Fulbright scholar from Taiwan visiting the Education Department of UCI from August 2008 to May 2009. This is her second time being awarded the Fulbright visiting scholarship. Her first Fulbright visit was to the French Department of the University of California at Berkeley, where she was hosted by Dr. Richard Kern in 2000. For the second Fulbright visit, she was attracted to UC Irvine by the quality of research conducted by the faculty members in language, literacy, and technology, especially the exuberant works by Dr. Mark Warschauer. After arriving at UCI, she has been sitting in on Dr. Warschauer’s class and working with him on a paper related to the use of emergent technologies in adult education. A proposal for co-authoring a book related to technology and language learning 2.0 is also in prospect.
Professor Liaw received her doctoral degree in Educational Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M University in 1993. Her dissertation was selected as the Outstanding Dissertation of EDCI. In 1994, she took on the associate professor position in the Foreign Languages and Literature Department of Tunghai University in Taiwan and started teaching EFL (English as a Foreign Language) courses at the undergraduate level and EFL teacher education courses in the graduate program. In 1996, she started the Teacher Education Center for Tunghai University and was the first director of the Center. In 2003, she was promoted to full professor of the Foreign Languages and Literature Department of Tunghai University. In the same year, she was elected Chair of the Department. In 2005, she was recruited by the National Taichung University to establish the English Department for the University and became the founding Chair of the Department.
In addition to teaching and administrative services, Dr. Liaw enjoys conducting research related to reading, language education and policy, as well as computer-assisted language instruction. She has published articles in Reading Research and Instruction, Reading Horizons, Foreign Language Annals, Computers in Schools, System, Language Learning and Technology, and ReCALL. She has also conducted numerous research projects funded by the National Science Council in Taiwan and organized several international conferences on language teaching and learning. Her most recent projects are related to English language education policies in Taiwan and on using internet-mediated intercultural communication for EFL learning. She hopes that her language policy research findings will yield helpful information for the Ministry of Education to make sound decision when revising language education policies in Taiwan. Her research findings in intercultural communication inform her on how to better integrate technologies in her EFL classes.