UNCP linguistics professor Dr. Jeon earns international book award

UNC Pembroke linguistics professor Dr. Eun Hee Jeon has received an international award recognizing her research into second-language proficiency and the factors that influence how people learn and use a language.

The Japanese Language Testing Association (JLTA) has named Jeon and her co-editor, Dr. Yo In’nami of Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan, recipients of its 2024 Best Book Award for Understanding L2 Proficiency — Theoretical and Meta-analytic Investigations.

The book examines the factors that contribute to second- and foreign-language proficiency, including the relationships among reading, writing, listening and speaking skills and the linguistic, cognitive and other variables that support them.

For Jeon, the award represents the culmination of more than a decade of research that began with a study focused primarily on reading comprehension and eventually expanded to examine language proficiency more broadly.

The idea for the book emerged from a 2014 article Jeon presented at a conference. Among those in the audience was Jan Hulstijn, professor emeritus at the University of Amsterdam, who asked Jeon what she planned to pursue next.

“That got me to think about how I would expand my research,” Jeon said. “Until then my studies were pretty much focused on reading comprehension, and I thought it would be fun to expand my investigation to all language skills — reading, writing, listening and speaking.”

As Jeon and In’nami continued presenting their research at conferences, their work attracted the attention of a series editor at John Benjamins Publishing Company, who expressed interest in developing it into a book.

“Since my research focus had been reading comprehension, but the book focused on all four language skills, I really needed to recruit help from the authorities of writing, listening and speaking, as well as experts of language testing,” Jeon said.

Understanding L2 Proficiency—Theoretical and Meta-analytic Investigations is published by John Benjamins Publishing Company and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.