Hello! Welcome to my professional website!
My name is Lixia Cheng. Originally from mainland China, I completed a Ph.D. in Second Language Studies in the Department of English at Purdue University in 2014, with a concentration in language assessment. Apart from a Purdue Research Foundation (PRF) summer dissertation grant, my Ph.D. dissertation research titled "Effects of Pragmatic Task Features, English Proficiency, and Learning Setting on Chinese ESL/EFL Spoken Performance of Requests" also received two highly selective external grants in 2012. These external awarding agencies were The International Research Foundation for English Language Education (TIRF) and the Educational Testing Service (ETS) TOEFL Grants and Awards Committee.
I also completed a graduate certificate in Applied Statistics from the Department of Statistics at Purdue in 2011. I am a certified SAS® programmer, as well as a Qualified Administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) and the Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI). My professional qualifications and educational background earned me permanent residency in the US (a.k.a. "Green Card") through a self-petitioned National Interest Waver application on account of possessing exceptional abilities and holding an advanced degree.
Upon my Ph.D. graduation in summer 2014, I joined the then newly founded Purdue Language and Cultural Exchange (PLaCE), an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) bridge program for international undergraduate students at Purdue. I have since been responsible for language assessment and program evaluation in the PLaCE program. In addition to my core responsibilities in testing, evaluation, and assessment, I have also taught a three-credit EAP course for international undergraduate students; developed and taught a set of non-credit short courses for international graduate students; and designed a curriculum for and taught the three-credit ENGL 516 course, "Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL): Theoretical Foundations" to upper-division Global English majors.
Prior to this full-time position at PLaCE, I had spent five years working in the Oral English Proficiency Program (OEPP) at Purdue to test, teach, certify, and support prospective International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). I was the OEPP lead graduate testing coordinator and a research assistant for four years from 2006 until 2010. Other professional development experiences that I have engaged in include the following:
For the selective Bilsland Strategic Initiatives Fellowship (2011–12) from Purdue's Graduate School, I created and implemented a short course on second language (L2) pragmatics for international graduate students and spouses that I recruited across campus and from University Residences.
In 2010–14, I taught a range of ESL/EAP and linguistics courses to international graduate and undergraduate students as well as domestic undergraduates majoring in Elementary Education or English Education.
In May 2013 through May 2014, I co-developed, with a fellow Ph.D. candidate, and taught a three-credit course for matriculated undergraduate international students with lower proficiency scores, in addition to conducting pedagogy and technology training for fellow instructors working in Purdue's Student Success Center.
In 2006–09, I conducted a portion of the phonetic transcription-annotations and all the statistical analyses for a fluency study eventually published in Ginther, Dimova, & Yang (2010) in the Journal of Language Testing. In summer 2021, I performed confirmatory and expansive statistical analyses on the same fluency database, upon request from an assistant professor working for a Korean university who was conducting a meta analysis of published studies on temporal measures of speaking fluency.
I contributed to the Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT) Technical Manual (2016 Ed.).
I was a core member of the organizing teams for the 2009 and 2016 annual conferences of the Midwest Association of Language Testers (MwALT) held at Purdue. For the 2016 conference, I was appointed Academic Advisor, taking charge of recruiting proposal reviewers, revising the proposal review system, collecting reviewer scores and comments, and making and communicating (non)acceptance decisions.
I served as the Graduate Student Representative for two regional professional organizations: the Indiana Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (INTESOL) and the MwALT for one or two years, respectively. I was also the Treasurer for the Purdue ESL Graduate-student Organization for a year.
Overall, I consider myself as an applied linguist who specializes in language assessment, program evaluation, and L2 pragmatics in the broad fields of Applied Linguistics and ESL Education. My scholarship spans across these domains: 1) publications about ESL testing and teaching; 2) PLaCE program reports; 3) the development and presentation of internet-based language tests, their companion web apps for test admin and rating, and the tests' associated rating scales; 4) presentations at international, national, and regional academic conferences; and 5) test demos, invited lectures, and curriculum or assessment related workshops.