Rate My Professor Xiaoting Li

Xiaoting Li is Professor of Chinese Linguistics in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta. She received her PhD in linguistics and applied linguistics from Peking University in 2011. Her research specializes in interactional linguistics and multimodal analysis of everyday Mandarin talk-in-interaction. She investigates how interactants deploy multimodal resources including lexico-syntax, prosody, and bodily-visual conduct to organize turns, sequences, and courses of action in conversation. Li analyzes recordings of naturally occurring face-to-face interactions, employing Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics, and multimodal methods. Her work encompasses cross-linguistic comparisons of Mandarin with English and German conversations, exploring phenomena such as prosodic and embodied matching, interpersonal touch, syntactically incomplete turns, and request for confirmation sequences. As Director of the Chinese Multimodality Lab, she leads research on these topics. Li proposed and led the Signature Area on Language, Communication, and Culture (LCC) in the Faculty of Arts from 2019 to 2023, fostering interdisciplinary scholarship on interpersonal, intercultural, and organizational communication across linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Li's career includes international fellowships: DAAD fellow at the University of Potsdam (2008-2010), Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Freiburg (2019-2021), and research fellow at the Siebold-Collegium Institute, University of Würzburg (2020). She has received the Martha Cook Piper Research Prize (2021), Faculty of Arts Research Excellence Award (2023), and Dissertation Award from the German Society for Discourse and Interaction Analysis (2010), all at the University of Alberta. Her grants include SSHRC Insight Development Grant for unfinished utterances in Mandarin conversation (2017-2019) and Kule Institute of Advanced Studies funding for intercultural communication among international students. Key publications feature the monograph Multimodality, Interaction, and Turn-taking in Mandarin Conversation (John Benjamins, 2014); articles such as Leaning and recipient intervening questions in Mandarin conversation (Journal of Pragmatics, 2014), Interpersonal Touch in Conversational Joking (Research on Language and Social Interaction, 2020), and Multimodal assemblies for prefacing a dispreferred response (Frontiers in Psychology, 2021). Li teaches Chinese linguistics, language in Chinese society, and Chinese-English translation; supervises graduate students; and will serve as editor for the Journal of Chinese Language and Discourse starting in 2026. She has acted as interim Associate Dean of Research and Associate Dean International in the Faculty of Arts.