Koen Van Gorp

vangorpk@msu.edu

B262 Wells Hall
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824

FacultyLinguistics, Languages, and CulturesLess Commonly Taught LanguagesSecond Language Studies

Assistant Professor
TESOL; Second Language Studies

ORCID: 0000-0002-2033-3852

Biography

Ph.D., KU Leuven (Belgium)

Koen Van Gorp is Assistant Professor in the Applied Linguistics program (TESOL and Second Language Studies), and LCTL Coordinator at the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University.

Koen is the Co-PI and Head of Research of the National LCTL Resource Center (NLRC), a Department of Education/Title VI-funded national language resource center.

Koen is the Curriculum and Assessment Director and Co-Investigator of the Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous Languages Partnership (2016-2023), a Mellon Foundation sponsored project to improve the teaching of less commonly taught languages (LCTL) as well as Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) (watch a short video on our second cycle here) and advance strategic cooperation within the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

Before joining MSU in 2016, Koen worked at the Centre for Language and Education (KU Leuven) for almost 25 years. From 2010 onward, he was an Associate Director of the CLE and the Director of the Certificate of Dutch as a Foreign Language (CNaVT), the international standardized test of Dutch as a Foreign Language. Koen is still a Research Fellow at the Research Group Language, Education and Society and the Centre for Language and Education, KU Leuven, Belgium.

Key interests include task-based language teaching and assessment, second language development, content-based language learning, curriculum development, teacher training, language awareness and multilingual education, and language-in-education policy.

Together with Kris Van den Branden (KU Leuven), Koen is founding Co-Editor of TASK. Journal on Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning (John Benjamins). He is also Treasurer of the International Association for Task-Based Language Teaching (IATBLT), member of the Editorial Board of ITL – International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and Individual Expert Member for the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE).

Currently, Koen is a member of the TOEFL Committee of Examiners (COE) at Educational Testing Service (ETS) (October 2020-September 2024) and a member of  the TOEFL Committee of Examiners Young Student Series Research Subcommittee (October 2020 – September 2024). He also serves as a Co-PI for the Center for Standardized Testing in Education in Flanders, Belgium.

Publications

Coss, M., & Van Gorp, K. (2022). Feedback and Assessment. (Fall 2022 Focus Topic: Assessment and Feedback). The Language Educator 17(4), 18-22.

Vandommele, G., Van Gorp, K., Van den Branden, K., & De Maeyer, S. (2022). Assessing the development of L2 speaking skills in inside-school and outside-school settings through growth modeling. Applied Linguistics. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amac024

Sierens, S., Van Gorp, K., Slembrouck, S., & Van Avermaet, P. (2022). The relationship between cognitive/linguistic task difficulties and linguistic interdependence in emergent bilinguals: An exploratory study using a task-based listening comprehension test. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 44(4), 1020-1044. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263121000826

Fritzsche, S., Giupponi, L., Heidrich Uebel, E., Kronenberg, F., Long, C. P., Van Gorp, K. (2022). Languages as Drivers of Institutional Diversity: The Case of Less Commonly Taught Languages (Winter 2022 Special Issue: Antiracism in the World Language Classroom). The Language Educator 17(1), 45-47.

Van Gorp, K., & Van den Branden, K. (2021). Engineering TBLT. An interview with Marta González-Lloret in memory of Mike Long. TASK. Journal on Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning 1(2), 184-195.

De Backer, F., Vantieghem, W., Van Gorp, K., Slembrouck, S., & Van Avermaet, P. (2021). Teacher expectations of multilingual students’ achievement: Can teachers accurately predict science performance on a linguistically accommodated test? (Special Issue: Assessment Innovations in Multilingual Contexts, Guest editors: J. L. Schissel & A. Arias). Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices 2(2), 207-232. https://doi.org/10.1558/jmtp.19513

Uştuk, Ö., & Van Gorp, K. (2021). Putting process drama in practice with TBLT principles: TESOL in action. TESOL Quarterly 55(2), 643-654. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3003

Van Gorp, K. (2021). Blue-sky thinking about TBLT: An interview with Martin Bygate. TASK. Journal on Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning 1(1), 126-136. https://doi.org/10.1075/task.00006.gor

Van den Branden, K., & Van Gorp, K. (2021). Implementing task-based language education in primary education: Lessons learnt from the Flemish experience. Language Teaching for Young learners 3(1), 3-27. https://doi.org/10.1075/ltyl.20013.bra

Sierens, S., Van Gorp, K., Slembrouck, S., & Van Avermaet, P. (2021). The strength of cross-language interdependence between listening comprehension proficiency in Turkish–Dutch emergent bilinguals: Testing Three Hypotheses. Language Learning 71(2), 453-486. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12441