Dr. Kyoungmi Ha appointed Assistant Professor in Asian Studies (Korean Language & Culture)

The Department of Asian & Asian American Studies would like to welcome Dr. Kyoungmi Ha who is the newly appointed Assistant Professor in Asian Studies (Korean Language & Culture). She received her Ph.D. in Asian Languages & Cultures (Korean Linguistics) at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Her research interests include discourse/conversation analysis, prosody, second language acquisition, and language pedagogy. Her current research explores the ways in which Korean speakers utilize sentence-ending suffixes to convey specific social actions and knowledge levels in both ordinary conversation and institutional talk. Using naturally-occurring large data, she examines the regularity of language use of social interactions cross-linguistically.

Kyoungmi has long been interested in language pedagogy with an emphasis on Korean. She has a BA degree in both Education and Korean Language/Literature and an MA degree in TESOL/Applied Linguistics. She has taught Korean language classes at SDSU, UCSD, La Sierra University, UCLA, and Claremont McKenna College. Kyoungmi’s research also suggests a new perspective for teaching grammar in the language classroom.