Rate My Professor Carmen Taleghani Nikazm

Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm is Professor and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University, where she also serves as professor of applied linguistics and German. She earned her B.A. in Linguistics from Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in 1989, followed by an M.A. in 1995 and a Ph.D. in 1999, both in Germanic Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic career began as Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas from 1999 to 2006, after which she joined The Ohio State University as Associate Professor from 2006 to 2019, advancing to full Professor in 2019. Administrative roles include Director of Undergraduate German Language Instruction and Individualized Instruction at OSU since 2012, previously holding the same position at the University of Kansas, and Chair of the Department since July 2023. She is a member of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Second Language Studies and has organized international symposia, such as the 2012 Reference in Interaction Symposium funded by OSU's College of Arts and Sciences Research Enhancement Grant.

Taleghani-Nikazm's research centers on language use in social and cultural settings, utilizing conversation analysis and interactional linguistics to examine how speakers formulate utterances to perform social actions like requests and invitations in everyday, L1 (German and Persian), L2, and multilingual interactions. Her work explores interactional competence, multimodality, video-mediated interaction, sociolinguistics, and applications to L2 teaching, teacher training, and materials development. Major publications include her monograph Request sequences: The intersection of grammar, interaction and social context (2006, John Benjamins), the co-edited volume Mobilizing others: Grammar and lexis within larger activities (2020, John Benjamins), and highly cited articles such as "How can insights from conversation analysis be directly applied to teaching L2 pragmatics?" (2006, Language Teaching Research, 271 citations), "A conversation analytical study of telephone conversation openings between native and nonnative speakers" (2002, 114 citations), and "Rethinking language teacher training: Steps for making talk-in-interaction research accessible to practitioners" (2019, Classroom Discourse). With over 1,000 citations on Google Scholar, her contributions influence interactional linguistics, second language acquisition, and pedagogy through collaborative projects with scholars in the US, Canada, Germany, and Ireland. She teaches courses on conversation analysis, L2 pragmatics, German sociolinguistics, and the structure of spoken German.