Prof. Yi Xu (Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching) currently serves as a Professor of Chinese Linguistics and Language Acquisition at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. She is the Academic Coordinator of the Chinese Language Program and the Director of Graduate Studies in the East Asian Languages and Literatures Department at Pitt. She was the former President of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA, and has published widely in impactful journals, including Foreign Language Annals, The Modern Language Journal, System, Language Teaching Research, etc. She specializes in linguistic perspectives of Chinese as a foreign language, including learners’ reading acquisition, character and vocabulary learning, and grammatical development. Her recent projects also include language teachers’ professional challenges and the impact of remote language teaching.

Dr. Lin Chen currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (USA), and as an Assistant Professor at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She served as an Associate Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-Sen University (Guangzhou, China) from January 2015 to July 2018 and as a Research Associate at the University of Pittsburgh (USA) from August 2018 to December 2023. Her main research areas include morphological property, polysemy, structural priming, reading, bilingualism, etc.