Home Department: East Asian Studies
Department Head of East Asian Studies
Co-Director, Center for East Asian Studies
SLAT Areas of Specialization: Instructional Dimensions of L2 Learning, Sociocultural Dimensions of L2 Learning
Dr. Wenhao Diao is the Department Head and an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the interdisciplinary graduate program of Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. She founded and co-directs the Center for East Asian Studies, a Title VI National Resource Center supported by the US Department of Education, at the University of Arizona. She received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and her B.A. and M.A. from East China Normal University. Since 2023, she has been directing STARTALK: Chinese Pathways in Arizona, a summer residential program for high school students funded by the National Security Agency. As an applied linguist, Dr. Diao is interested in the identities and ideologies that Chinese language learning and teaching (re)produce and (re)distribute. Her research has primarily focused on Chinese language teachers in K-16 contexts, as well as the phenomenon of study abroad -- particularly going to and from China. Her articles have appeared on journals such as Applied Linguistics, Modern Language Journal, System, and so on. With her colleagues in the field, she has published an edited book entitled Language Learning in Study Abroad: The Multilingual Turn (Multilingual Matters, 2021) and a guest edited special issue themed Study Abroad in the 21st Century for the L2 Journal in 2016. She is an Area Editor in charge of Second Language Acquisition for the journal Linguistic Vanguard. Prior to joining the University of Arizona, she taught at Middlebury College, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Virginia, and East China Normal University.