Hyoun-A Joo

Hyoun-A Joo received her Ph.D. in German Applied Linguistics and Language Science from the Pennsylvania State University in 2018. Before joining the Georgia Tech faculty as assistant professor of German in the School of Modern Languages in 2020, she worked as postdoctoral GLACT fellow at Georgia Tech from 2018-2019 and as assistant professor of German and Linguistics at Furman University in Greenville, SC, from 2019-2020.

Her overarching research interests lie in bilingualism and language contact at their intersections with society and identity. Her research investigates structural properties of second language (L2) acquisition as well as pragmatic patterns of speech acts used by adult immigrants. One of her first research projects investigated how Korean immigrants in Germany who came for work purposes around the 1970s acquired asymmetric verb placement in their L2 German "on the fly" by living and working in Germany and how social factors influenced the acquisition of the target language. Her most recent project explores how German immigrants in the U.S. produce face-threatening speech acts such as requests and refusals, addressing the underresearched intersection between bilingualism and pragmatic competence and how speech styles mark bilingual, intercultural idenity. A further interest in her research and teaching is how intercultural communicative competence can be developed through interactive methods such as case study simulations.