Yang Xiao-Desai

Email: 

Title: 

Assistant Professor

Department: 

Foreign Languages & LitCollege of Liberal and Creative Arts

Office Hours (Additional Info): 

on sabbatical (Aug. 2019 - Aug. 2020)

Website: 

At SF State Since: 

2014

Bio: 

Dr. Yang Xiao-Desai is a professor of Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures. She received her Ph. D. from University of Hawaii at Manoa. Prior to joining San Francisco State University in 2014, she taught in University of South Carolina, University of California, Davis, Middlebury College (Summer Chinese School), and University of Hawaii. 

Her main areas of research are in heritage language development, second language acquisition, and Chinese sociolinguistics. She is interested in social and affective factors of heritage/immigrant language population, such as anxiety, identity, and willingness to communicate. She uses mixed method and learner corpus data to study heritage language development, particularly the development of pragmatic competence. 

In SFSU, she teaches Chinese Applied Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Curriculum and Instruction. Her specialty also includes Chinese language program development, curriculum design, and world language teacher training.