Judit Kormos is a Hungarian-born applied linguist and Professor of Second Language Acquisition at Lancaster University, best known for two distinct contributions: a cognitive account of how second-language speakers plan, monitor, and repair their own speech, and the foundational body of work on teaching additional languages to learners with dyslexia and other specific learning differences. Her career bridges laboratory psycholinguistics and inclusive classroom practice, and she is widely regarded as the leading authority on language learning and specific learning differences.
Kormos completed her doctorate at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 1999, supervised by Zoltán Dörnyei. She joined Lancaster University in 2008, where she holds a personal chair as Professor of Second Language Acquisition. At Lancaster she has built a programme of research and teacher development around the learning of additional languages by students with specific learning difficulties, hosting open resources and leading externally funded projects in the area. She sits on the editorial boards of Applied Linguistics and the Journal of Second Language Writing.
Her early work gave applied linguistics one of its clearest treatments of L2 monitoring and self-correction, connecting speech-production theory to how learners catch and fix their own errors in real time, and it remains a standard reference on the cognitive side of speaking. The second strand reshaped how the field treats inclusion. Through the European-funded Dyslexia for Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (DysTEFL) project, which won a British Council innovation award, and later initiatives such as the EnGaGe task bank for young dyslexic learners, she translated dyslexia research into teacher-ready training and materials. Her account of how limits in Working Memory and phonological processing shape additional-language learning underpins much of the current ELT understanding of dyslexia and the broader question of special educational needs, moving the topic from the margins of teacher discourse toward the mainstream.