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 L2 use by adult immigrants and heritage speaker communities. In her dissertation Clausal architecture in naturally acquired German: Korean immigrants in Germany, she worked with Korean immigrants who came to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s for work purposes and acquired their L2 “on the fly” by living and working. She investigated their acquisition of the German asymmetric finite verb placement. More recently, she became interested in intercultural pragmatics and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and started a project about how to become “better communicators” involving German-English bilinguals in the Southeast and how they express politeness when requesting and refusing in English versus German. She sees growth in ICC connected to creating and maintaining peaceful relationships and continuously seeks ways to integrate effective teaching methods such as case studies and simulations in her classes.