Announcing AY 2026-27 Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Dr. Lee Jin Choi

Dr. Lee Jin Choi's research examines the intersections of language, migration, ideology, education, and inequality in contemporary South Korea. Drawing on ethnography, interviews, and critical discourse analysis, she explores how transnational and migrant-background speakers—children of marriage-migrant mothers, returnees from early study abroad, and international students—navigate Korean classrooms and workplaces in which English functions as a prized yet unevenly distributed resource. Her current project, supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea, focuses on linguistic discrimination and trauma among students of migrant background, tracing how native-speakerist and monolingual ideologies determine whose multilingualism is recognized as competence and whose is heard as deficiency. Across these lines of inquiry, she argues that while multilingual repertoires are increasingly celebrated in Korean education, the legitimacy extended to them remains circumscribed by entrenched hierarchies of language, nation, and social class.

Dr. Choi received her Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, her M.A. in Second Language Studies from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and her B.A. in English Education from Korea University. Her articles have appeared in Applied Linguistics Review, TESOL Quarterly, Multilingua, and the British Journal of Sociology of Education, among others.  She is Associate Professor of English Education at Hongik University, where she has chaired the Department of English Education and the Division of General Foreign Languages, and she is delighted to be spending this semester at Harvard as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar.