Dr. Liying Cheng
MA (Reading), PhD (Hong Kong)
Professor of Language Education and Assessment, Graduate Faculty
Director, Assessment and Evaluation Group
Biography:
Liying Cheng has been a language teacher and language teacher educator for more than 20 years, during which time she has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses at the pre-service, professional development and graduate levels at a number of universities in Canada, Hong Kong, and China. Her primary research interests are the impact of large-scale testing on instruction, the relationships between assessment and instruction, and the academic and professional acculturation of international and new immigrant students, workers, and professionals to Canada. She received the TOEFL award for outstanding dissertation in second/foreign language testing from Educational Testing Services in 1998, and TESOL Leadership Mentoring Award from TESOL in 2002.
Liying had her formative and undergraduate education in China. She received MA in teaching English as a Foreign Language from the University of Reading in England, and PhD in second/foreign language testing from the University of Hong Kong. Before she joined Queen’s University in 2000, she was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow (1998-2000) within the Centre for Research in Applied Measurement and Evaluation (CRAME) and the TESL program at the University of Alberta. From 1996 to 1998, she was an Assistant Professor at the School of Education and Languages, Open University of Hong Kong.
Since 2000 after Liying joined Queen's Faculty of Education, she has obtained research funding totalling more than 1.8 million Canadian dollars. In addition, she has conducted more than 230 conference presentations and has more than 150 publications. Her recent books are Assessment in the Language Classroom: Teachers Supporting Student Learning (co-authored with J. Fox, 2017); Language classroom assessment (single-authored, TESOL, Inc., 2013); English Language Assessment and the Chinese Learner (co-edited with A. Curtis, Taylor & Francis, 2010); Language Testing Reconsidered (co-edited with J. Fox et. al., University of Ottawa Press, 2007); Changing Language Teaching through Language Testing (single-authored, Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Washback in Language Testing: Research Contexts and Methods (co-edited with Y. Watanabe with A, Curtis, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004).