Christine Goh

Christine Chuen Meng Goh is a Singaporean applied linguist and President's Chair Professor of Education (Linguistics & Language Education) at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University. Her research sits at the centre of L2 listening pedagogy, and together with Vandergrift she did more than anyone to make metacognition a working category for listening teachers rather than a theoretical gesture.

Goh took her PhD in Linguistics from Lancaster University on strategic processing and metacognition in L2 listening, an MA in Applied English Linguistics from Birmingham, and a BA and Dip Ed from the University of Malaya. Her work treats listening as something learners can be taught to manage, not just exposed to, and it has shaped Singapore's English curriculum and the wider teacher-education field well beyond it.

Career

• BA (Hons) English and Dip Ed, University of Malaya; MA Applied English Linguistics, Birmingham (Chevening Scholar); PhD Linguistics, Lancaster
• Associate Professor and then Professor at NIE, NTU
• Dean of Graduate Studies and Professional Learning, NIE (2014–2018)
• Director of the National Institute of Education, NTU (2018–2024)
• President's Chair Professor of Education at NTU
• Long-standing adviser to Singapore's Ministry of Education on English language education

Published Work

• "A cognitive perspective on language learners' listening comprehension problems," System 28(1), 55–75 (2000)
• Teaching Listening in the Language Classroom (2002, SEAMEO RELC)
• "The metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire (MALQ): Development and validation" (with Vandergrift, Mareschal, and Tafaghodtari), Language Learning 56 (2006)
• Teaching Speaking: A Holistic Approach (with Anne Burns, Cambridge, 2012)
• Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action (with Vandergrift, Routledge, 2012; 2nd ed. 2022)

Influence

• Her 2000 System study set the field's template for cataloguing real-time listening problems across perception, parsing, and utilisation
• The MALQ, co-developed with Vandergrift, is the standard instrument for measuring L2 listeners' metacognitive awareness
• The metacognitive pedagogical sequence in Vandergrift & Goh has become the default classroom model for process-oriented listening instruction, sitting alongside Field's diagnostic work on decoding
• In speaking research, her holistic framework with Burns gave teachers a principled alternative to task-only approaches