Dr. Han is Professor of Applied Linguistics, Director of the Center for International Foreign Language Teacher Education (CIFLTE), and Director of the TC-Tunisia Foreign Language Teacher Education Transnational Project, at Teachers College, Columbia University. From 2018 to 2020, she served, energetically and with great integrity, as Chair of the Department of Arts and Humanities, the largest academic department at Teachers College, leading with a vision, rallying the entire department - faculty, staff, and students - around innovative, transparent, and equitable practices, and promoting academic excellence.
Dr. Han's scholarly interests are broadly in second language learnability, second language teachability, and their interface. Her work on fossilization, crosslinguistic influence, corrective feedback, second language thinking for speaking, second language reading and vocabulary development, second language reading instruction, input enhancement, second language ab initio input processing, task-based language learning, and foreign language teacher education, among many topics, has appeared in a variety of journals and books. Dr. Han is the recipient of the 2003 International TESOL Heinle and Heinle Distinguished Research Award as well as a repeated recipient of the Teachers College, Columbia University Outstanding Teacher Award.
Dr. Han has served on multiple editorial boards of academic journals including Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press) and Language Teaching (Cambridge University Press). She has served as a keynote speaker at numerous international conferences on second language acquisition and second language teaching.
Over the last twenty years, in addition to teaching graduate courses (from theory to research to practice) and sponsoring doctoral dissertations at Teachers College, Dr. Han has consulted to universities and school districts on research and teacher development grants and second language programs, curriculums, and materials. She has designed and conducted foreign language teacher education programs in various parts of the world, and she is multilingual.
See also: Dr. Han's 2021 interview with the editorial board of SALT