Lixia Cheng
- Associate Director of Evaluation // PLaCE
Research Focus
language assessment, program evaluation, pragmatics, language education technologies, internationalization
Office and Contact
Courses
SCLA 110 (formerly, ENGL 110)
PLaCE Short Courses
- Academic Writing Practicum
- Intermediate Grammar
- Advanced Grammar
- Email Writing
Lixia Cheng is a 2014 PhD graduate of the Second Language Studies program at Purdue University. She also holds a graduate certificate in Applied Statistics from Purdue and is a certified SAS programmer. As one of the two inaugural program administration specialists and part of the first instructor-group for the Purdue Language and Cultural Exchange (PLaCE), she had been a curriculum co-developer and teacher educator in AY 2013–2014 before program establishment and has worked extensively on language assessment and program evaluation since August 2014.
Her other professional experiences have included 1) being the lead graduate testing coordinator and research assistant for Purdue's International Teaching Assistants (ITA) program (the OEPP) for four years; 2) teaching a range of ESL, English for Academic Purposes, and educational linguistics courses at Purdue and in two top-tier universities in China for a combined total of over 20 years; 3) proposing and implementing grant projects focused on second language instruction and assessment (e.g., Aug. 2011–Jul. 2012 Bilsland Strategic Initiatives Fellowship; Jan. 2023–Dec. 2024 Brightspace Innovation Program grant); 4) creating content for and updating PLaCE website since 2024; 5) being the approved non-faculty PI for research studies collecting data from PLaCE.
Her PhD dissertation won two highly selective grants from external funding agencies: the ETS TOEFL Grants and Awards Committee and The International Research Foundation for English Language Education (TIRF). Besides book chapters and an encyclopedia entry, her scholarship has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Language Testing, L2 Journal, the Journal of International Students, the NYS TESOL Journal, and the INTESOL Journal.