Starting in the fall semester of 2021, Dr. Koen Van Gorp will join the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages (LingLang) and the Second Language Studies Program (SLS) as a tenure-system Assistant Professor. Since 2016, he has worked at the Center for Language Teaching Advancement (CeLTA) as the head of Foreign Language Assessment and a researcher in several projects, including the LCTL and Indigenous Languages Partnership (a Andrew W. Mellon Grant) and Language Flagship Proficiency Initiative. His move to the new role within the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) will enhance the teaching and research mission of the TESOL and SLS programs, and the service/outreach activities of LingLang. His engagement with LingLang’s Less Commonly Taught Languages program (LCTL) as a LCTL coordinator will serve as a continued bridge to work with CeLTA and CAL on collaborative projects.
Dr. Van Gorp is an educational linguist who specializes in second language acquisition, task-based language teaching and assessment, and critical multilingual awareness in education. He received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from KU Leuven (Belgium) in 2010, and serves as a Research Fellow at KU Leuven.
From 1991 until 2015, he worked at the Centre for Language and Education (KU Leuven) in different leadership roles. From 2010 until 2015, he was the Director of the Certificate of Dutch as a Foreign Language, the international standardized test of Dutch as a Foreign Language. At KU Leuven, he was involved in in-service teacher training and curriculum development. He worked with school teams and teachers of Dutch as a second language in K-12 settings and with teachers of Dutch as a foreign language at universities worldwide.
Dr. Van Gorp has published extensively in Dutch and English. Recently, he co-edited The Multilingual Edge of Education (Palgrave, 2018) with colleagues from Ghent University and Language Awareness in Multilingual Classrooms in Europe: From Theory to Practice (De Gruyter Mouton, 2018) with colleagues from Belgium and France.
He is founding Co-Editor (with Kris Van den Branden, KU Leuven) of TASK. Journal on Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning, and Treasurer of the Executive Board of the International Association for Task-Based Language Teaching (IATBLT).
While Dr. Van Gorp’s colleagues in CeLTA will greatly miss him, they look forward to continuing work on several of these current as well as future collaborative projects. LingLang is looking forward to welcoming Dr. Van Gorp to its diverse and vibrant academic community, and expects continued close working relationships between the two units.
