An Chung Cheng, Ph.D, specialized in second language acquisition and teacher education, is a professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures.  She is the coordinator of the Elementary and Intermediate Spanish Program and the advisor of Master of Arts in Spanish.  Dr. Cheng directs the Asian Studies Program/ Institute in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies of the College of Arts and Letters.  As an affiliated faculty with the Judith Herb College of Education, she teaches and advises students of Multi-Age Foreign Language Education Program at the undergraduate level and Licensure and Master’s Program (LAMP) in foreign languages.

Professor Cheng’s research areas include instructed second language acquisition, third language acquisition, multilingualism, heritage language education, input processing, corpus-based approach in second language acquisition, and teacher research. She has been involved in teaching, research and service in community-based Chinese heritage schools. As a principal investigator, she led a research project on Chinese heritage programs in the US (2009-2013), funded by the International Research and Studies Grant of the US Department of Education. She was the PI/Program Director of STARTALK-CHELER Chinese Leadership Program for teachers of community-based Chinese heritage schools funded by NSA each year from 2013 to 2018 and was the program director/instructor for the 2021 program. She has also been the Co-PI on several corpus-based research projects on the L3 Spanish acquisition of Chinese-speaking learners in collaboration with Dr. Hui-Chuan Lu of National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan.  The grants were funded by the Ministry of Sciences and Technology or Ministry of Education in Taiwan, the Republic of China since 2006.

Dr. Cheng has also participated actively in the service of professional organizations. She served as the secretary, vice chair, and chair of ACTFL Less Commonly Taught Languages Special Interest Group in 2012-2017.  She has served as the vice president (2016-2018) and the president (2018-2020) of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages. She is the reviewer of the Program for the Preparation of Foreign Language Teachers by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). She is the co-chair of the Ohio Transfer Assurance Guides (TAGs) Spanish review committee.