Rate My Professor Priyanvada Abeywickrama

Priyanvada Abeywickrama is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at San Francisco State University, where she serves as TESOL Program Coordinator and CMS Coordinator. A native of Sri Lanka, she earned her M.A. in Applied Linguistics/TESL from Iowa State University and her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Abeywickrama joined San Francisco State University in 2007. She began her professional career as an ESL instructor at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka, contributing to teaching, curriculum development, and materials design. Her teaching experience includes college-level courses in Sri Lanka and the United States, such as TESL methods and language assessment in the MATESOL program at California State University, Los Angeles, and the U.S. State Department-sponsored Uzbek Teacher Training Program.

Abeywickrama's research interests encompass language assessment combined with second language literacy and oral skills, with a secondary focus on discourse analysis, specifically codeswitching. She presents regularly at major conferences, including the annual International TESOL convention, the American Association for Applied Linguistics, and the Language Testing Research Colloquium. Key publications include her co-authorship with H. Douglas Brown of Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices, 3rd edition (Pearson, 2018), as well as earlier editions in 2010 and 2004. Other notable works are "Why Not Non-native Varieties of English as Listening Comprehension Test Input?" (RELC Journal, 2013), "Purposes of Listening Assessment" (The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, 2018), and "TESOL Programs in Flux" (2023). In her coordinator roles, she oversees the TESOL program, training educators in linguistics-related fields at San Francisco State University.