Biography
Lini Xiao is a PhD candidate and Cambridge Trust scholar in the Faculty of Education, following the completion of an MPhil degree in Research in Second Language Education. Prior to Cambridge, she received her BA in English from Sun Yat-sen University in China and studied linguistics at University of Cologne in Germany. Her research focuses on the entwined phenomena of language learning and migration through the lenses of sociolinguistics and language education policy. She is particularly interested in understanding how mobile populations in contemporary societies learn, maintain, and manage languages across the lifespan, and what implications these processes have for human movements and social integration. Lini's PhD project explores how transnational (im)mobility mediates contemporary heritage language learning in a Chinese community school in London.
Research
Transnationalism; heritage/community language education; language and educational policies in relation to children on the move.