Biography

Professor Tao takes a usage-based approach to language and attempts to explain linguistic patterns from multiple perspectives, including social, cultural, and interactional. He works with both large quantities of computerized data as well as specific episodes of multimodal conversational interaction, with a keen interest in bridging the gap between linguistic research and language teaching and learning.

He received his PhD in linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1993. He is currently Professor of Chinese language and linguistics in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Prior to UCLA, he taught at the National University of Singapore and Cornell University. He also holds an honorary Chair Professorship at National Taiwan Normal University since 2015.