Yongcan’s research interests mainly lie in two areas, one theoretical and one practical. On the theoretical side, he is keen to push the boundaries of knowledge to theorize the social cognitive nature of second language learning and teaching. This is done through two theoretical lenses: (1) Community of Practice (CoP) theory, which focuses on the ideas of participation, distributed cognition, and situated practice; and (2) Sociocultural Theory (SCT) of mind, which deals with issues such as mediation, cognitive regulation, and potential development.

On the more practical side, Yongcan’s work focuses on finding ways to mobilize ‘linguistic capital’ in homes, schools, and communities to support bilingual children on the move. He has a long-standing interest in combining linguistic and social analysis to examine the schooling experience of EAL students and the professional knowledge base for teaching them. He has worked on a series of linked projects on EAL children’s language development, social integration and educational achievement, funded by the Bell Foundation. He is the co-author of ‘EAL Assessment Framework for Schools‘ for which he received a British Council ELTons Award in 2018. This work has been made an open-access tool to support planning and provision of EAL in primary and secondary schools across England. He is co-investigator of an interdisciplinary policy project on multilingualism (MEITS) funded by AHRC Open World Research Initiative, crossing the disciplines of arts, literature, linguistics, education, cognition, and health.

Yongcan is founder convener of Cambridge Research in Community Language Education Network (CRiCLE-Net), a university-school-community partnership. He also serves as Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, leading the strand on language, heritage, migration.

Yongcan trained in linguistics in China. A Chevening and a Dorothy Hodgkin Scholar, he completed his MPhil and Ph.D. at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. He has taught applied linguistics and English/Chinese as a foreign language in China, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates.

read more at:

https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/people/staff/liu/