Dr. Xia Chao is a faculty member of language and literacy education at the School of Education in Duquesne University. Her research, which is grounded in perspectives and methods from educational linguistics, critical applied linguistics, and anthropology, centers on investigating everyday language and literacy practices in schools, immigrant, refugee-background, and Indigenous families and communities as well as the preparation of teachers to teach multilingual learners.

Dr. Chao has published papers in peer-reviewed scholarly journals including Journal of Literacy Research, Linguistics and Education, Language and Education, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Teacher Education Quarterly, Adult Education Quarterly, Urban Education, etc. Dr. Chao is the recipient of the 2015 J. Michael Parker Award of the Literacy Research Association and the 2016 Outstanding Early Career Scholar Award of the American Educational Research Association’s Adult Literacy and Adult Education Special Interest Group. Her work has been funded by the National Geographic Society and Duquesne University.