DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

Yan Zhou received her Ph.D. in Chinese Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2022.

Before joining Northwestern, Yan taught Chinese language courses at Beijing Normal University, Bucknell University, UCLA, and the Princeton in Beijing summer immersion program.  At UCLA, she also taught Chinese Language and Culture, Chinese Linguistics, and Asian Language Pedagogy.  She was awarded the 2018 Mellon-EPIC Fellowship in Teaching Excellence and has served as the Co-Principal Investigator of a funded project to study inclusive teaching in Chinese language classrooms.

Yan applies research methods informed by conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, and corpus linguistics to analyze linguistic and conversational practices in various types of social interactions such as everyday conversations, classroom interactions, and media discourses.

Her current research projects investigate the timing and multimodal design of speech acts in Chinese, which will have direct implications for the teaching and learning of the Chinese language and culture. She is also involved in the international collaborative project Analysis of Multilingual Pandemic Narratives.  Her research articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Chinese Language and Discourse, International Journal of Chinese Language Education, and Text and Talk.