Skip to main content

Yangtian Luo

Assistant Professor of Instruction

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison

Yangtian, specializing in Chinese Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, holds a Ph.D. in Chinese Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Before joining Northwestern, she was a Lecturer of Chinese at Lawrence University, an M.A. Fellow in Chinese at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, and an Instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These roles helped her refine her teaching skills and expand her understanding of language and cultural studies. Yangtian's commitment to teaching has been recognized with the Honorable Mention Early-career Teaching Award at Lawrence University and the Honored Instructor title at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Yangtian's publications include works in the International Journal of Chinese Linguistics and a study examining the impact of COVID-19 on Chinese L2 learners' motivation. Her ongoing research revolves around a multi-modal Chinese text corpus focusing on Speech Respiration, an exploration aimed at understanding the complexities of learning Mandarin. By investigating the correlation between the prosodic features of Mandarin Chinese and respiratory rhythms in speech activity, Yangtian hopes to advance teaching methodologies in Mandarin.