Dr Yanyu Guo is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Chinese Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Director of the MA -Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages programme (MA-TCSOL), and the Interim Irish Director of the Confucius Institute at University College Cork. She works on language acquisition and processing, Chinese language education, and Chinese linguistics. She serves as a board member on the Committee on Linguistics Theories and Language Education Research of the International Society for Chinese Language Teaching. Dr. Guo is the PI of two multilingualism projects focusing on English-Irish-Chinese and English-Korean-Chinese trilinguals, funded by Enterprise Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy, respectively. She is also a collaborator on an international project investigating Ln acquisition of Chinese in Spain, in partnership with Shanghai Jiaotong University, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the University of Cambridge.

Dr Guo was trained in theoretical linguistics at Renmin University of China (B.A.) and Peking University (M.A.). She obtained her doctorate in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, supported by a Trinity College external studentship. Her dissertation investigated the L2 acquisition of Chinese aspect markers by English native speakers. She then held a post-doctoral fellowship at Cambridge for four years, working on the major research project funded by the AHRC: Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies (MEITS) and the Cambridge-Chinese University of Hong Kong Joint Laboratory for Bilingualism. Her post-doc projects examined the potential roles of age, typological differences, and linguistic experience in the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese by L2, L3 and heritage language learners. Before Dr Guo joined the Department of Asian Studies at UCC in 2020, she taught linguistics and Chinese language courses at Tsinghua University (2011-2013) and the University of Cambridge (2013-2020).

Bilingualism and multilingualism in childhood and adulthood

Language processing

GenAI enhanced language education

Chinese linguistics

Formal linguistics (syntax-semantics interface)

Second language acquisition

Heritage language acquisition

Teaching and learning of Chinese

Chinese language pedagogy

Applied linguistics

Syntax of Chinese

Postgraduate research methods

Enterprise Ireland for ERC Support for the project “Diversity and Unity among Multilinguals: Acquiring East Asian Languages in Europe” (2022, EC-2020-1317, €15,898)

Royal Irish Academy Charlemont Grants 2025 for the project “Linguistic Distance and Second Language Proficiency in Third Language Acquisition” (Charlemont HSS25)

1. Kaihui Han (Cross-linguistic Influence in L3 Mandarin: An Eye-Tracking Study on Sentence-Final Particle Clusters among Korean L1 Speakers);

2. Hao Zhang (Personalised Learning Paths Supported by Generative AI in Second Language Acquisition of Chinese);

3. Yingying Song (Heritage Language Acquisition of Chinese in AI-Enhanced Learning Environments);

4. Luyan Zan (Wife, Maidservant, and Prostitute: Trafficking of Lower-Class Women in Shanghai during Republican Times);

5. Shuai Liu (The Translation of Late Qing Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World).

1. Rongrong Guo (The development of oral competence: A corpus study measuring Chinese L2 undergraduate students in Ireland, 2022);

2. Wanlin Li (Effects of Teaching Methods on L2 Learning of Chinese tones, 2022).