About

Agnes Weiyun He is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at SUNY-Stony Brook University, where she is also the Founder and Director of the Center for Multilingual and Intercultural Communication (MIC). She has served as Chair and Interim Chair of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies. Professor He holds a B.A. in English from Beijing Foreign Studies University, a Diploma-in-Education from the National Institute of Education in Singapore, an M.A. in English as a Second Language from the University of Arizona, and a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from UCLA. Her research centers on how language use is motivated by contextual and co-textual contingencies and how everyday human interaction reconstructs identities, communities, and cultures in real-time. Her early work focused on discourse and pragmatics in institutional settings, while her recent work explores the impact of globalization and immigration on language and cultural practices, particularly the socialization of Chinese as a heritage language and the development of intercultural communicative competence among multilingual speakers. Professor He has published extensively in discourse linguistics, educational linguistics, and Chinese linguistics, and her work has been funded by prominent organizations including the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Education. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011. Her teaching includes courses on intercultural communication, Mandarin Chinese structure, and Chinese language and culture, with occasional seminars on qualitative research methods and heritage languages in the U.S. She currently serves as Secretary of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (2022-2026).

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Pedagogy
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Epistemology
• Linguistics
• Archaeology
• History
• Philosophy
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• Study on vegetation cover change in Yunnan-Guizhou-Sichuan region

  2025-09-29

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• Voices of Immigration

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-12-20

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  What does immigration do to our languages and identities? What factors contribute to the maintenance or loss of immigrant languages? This book highlights theoretical and typological issues surrounding heritage language development, specifically focusing on Chinese-speaking communities in the USA. Based on a synthesis of observational, interview, reported, and audio/video data, it builds a composite, serial narrative of immigrant language and life. Through the voices of first- and second-generation immigrants, their family members and their teachers, it highlights the translingual practices and transforming interactional routines of heritage language speakers across various stages of life, and the congruencies between narrated perspectives and lived experiences. It shows that language, culture and identity are intricately interwoven, making it essential reading for students and scholars in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

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• From intercultural engagement to intercultural communicative competence: The case of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

  Foreign Language Annals · 2023 · 8 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Pedagogy

  Abstract As the objective of language teaching is shifting from producing so‐called “native‐like” speakers to fostering speakers competent in intercultural communication, it has become necessary to identify the kinds of learning resources that may be related to the learner's development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in today's context of globalization and technological innovation. Employing a mixed‐method approach with focus group interviews ( n = 46) and a survey ( n = 342), this study examines Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language learners' out‐of‐class intercultural experience and examines how interpersonal engagement and media usage are associated with the three dimensions of ICC: approach , analyze , and act . The study found that while both interpersonal interactions and media usage related to target language were positively associated with self‐reported gains in all three dimensions of ICC, media use consistently had a greater effect on ICC than interpersonal interactions. The implications of these findings for language educators are discussed.

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• Language socialization

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 1 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Sociology

  Language socialization, rooted in linguistic anthropology, is centrally concerned with how learning and growth takes place in and through language. It redefines what it means to know a language, advances an indexical (rather than correlational) view concerning language and culture, enables us to see the acquisition of language forms in a culturally accountable way, and takes ordinary interaction to be the primary sites for learning and socialization. Using ethnography and discourse analysis as its primary research methods, today the language socialization perspective is making significant contributions to applied linguistics by illuminating the process of language and cultural development in not only monolingual settings but also in multilingual, transcultural, transnational spaces by diverse populations, in different modalities, and with various individual and societal goals. It is well positioned to continue to unravel the language and learning trajectories in the increasingly complex realities of globalization, digitization, social change, and social justice.

  PublisherDOI

• A Narrative-Ethnographic Approach to Research on Heritage Language Development

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Epistemology
  • Sociology

  This chapter presents a qualitative approach to research on heritage language development – narrative ethnography, which integrates text-based methods of narrative analysis with field-based, interaction-enriched methods of linguistic anthropology. It begins with an overview of its epistemological orientations and an exploration of its usefulness for heritage language research before discussing its methodological orientations. It is argued that such an approach is particularly productive for a context-dependent field such as heritage language development. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the merits and challenges of this approach and its potential to advance knowledge about heritage language development and learning.

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• Constructing Discourse Identities in the Openings of Academic Counseling Encounters

  2018-01-16 · 1 citations

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  This chapter examines the opening sequences of video- and audio-recorded academic counseling encounters to see how the institutional identities of the student client and the counselor are made operative and consequential through the participants' interactions with each other. It shows that identity is an ever-changing collaborative construction by the participants on situated occasions through the medium of language. As a distinctive line of development deriving from H. Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, conversation analysis takes as a fundamental issue the problem of identity and membership: showing that the categories proposed for analysis are oriented to by participants themselves in and through talk. The nature and function of the opening sequences in the face-to-face institutional academic counseling interactions can be better understood in light of research on openings in casual conversations. The chapter reports some interactional methods whereby the student clients and their academic counselors construct themselves and one another in roles specific to the academic counseling setting.

  PublisherDOI

• A non-linear view on interactional competence: speaking Chinese as a heritage language

  2018-03-29 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Interactional competence highlights language as a form of social action. It brings together the symbiotic properties of language as a system of communication and as a situated sociocultural practice. In spite of its paramount importance, however, interactional competence is an area of language that is under-studied in SLA in general and in Chinese SLA in particular. This chapter presents a nonlinear, multi-scalar view on the development of interactional competence in Chinese as a heritage language (CHL). It places in the foreground the interactional space for language learning and the viability for language learning of given interactional moments. After a brief review of existing research on the development of Chinese discourse and interactional competence and relevant recent developments in SLA, it describes the characteristics of CHL and present a multi-scalar view that connects analyses of micro-moments of interaction to explorations of norms, cultures and history and that is couched in an overall composite lifespan approach to researching language and life. It concludes with pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research.

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• Heritage Language Learning and Socialization

  2017-01-01 · 4 citations

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• Discourse Analysis

  2017-03-11 · 6 citations

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• Heritage Language Learning and Socialization

  2017-01-01 · 2 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• Elizabeth M. Keating

  University of Utah

  9 shared

• Yiya Chen

  Leiden University

  4 shared

• Richard Young

  4 shared

• Brian Lindsey

  Occidental College

  2 shared

• Snezha Tsoneva

  Plovdiv University

  2 shared

• Benjamin G. Davis

  University of Notre Dame

  2 shared

• Stéphane Roudeau

  Laboratoire de Physique des deux infinis Bordeaux

  1 shared

• Rowan K. Leary

  University of Cambridge

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Asian American Studies

  University of California, Berkeley

  2005

• M.A., Asian American Studies

  University of California, Berkeley

  2001

• B.A., Ethnic Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1998

Awards & honors

• Guggenheim Fellow (2011)