Seungja Choi

In the fall of 1990, Seungja K. Choi started the Korean Language Program at Yale with Professor Samuel E. Martin. She received her BA and MA in English literature from Yonsei University, an MA in linguistics from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in linguistics from Yale University with her dissertation research focusing on the nature of five sentence structures in Japanese and Korean: topic-comment, generic, predicate-denial, contrastive, and logophoric sentences.

Since then, she has continued to research, lecture, and publish on various topics related to Korean language structure and Korean language study in the United States. Her recent publications include “A New Paradigm on Korean Language Education” (2016), “History of the Korean Language Program at Yale” (2015), “Discrepancy between the Postpositional Markers nun in Korean and wa in Japanese in Interrogative Sentences” (2015), and “Korean Language Study in Higher Education in the U.S.: Context, Developments, and a Fresh Focus” (2012). In addition to the language courses from elementary through advanced levels, she also taught Korean Cinema and Linguistic Structure of Korean at Yale.

From 2008 to 2014, she served as associate director of undergraduate studies and director of East Asian Languages instruction in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. Currently she serves as an Editorial Board member of the International Journal of Korean Language Education. Her recent research interests include linguistic landscape, project-based language learning (PBLL), and advanced grammar in Korean.