Koen Van Gorp is Assistant Professor of TESOL and Second Language Studies, and LCTL Coordinator at the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University. From 2016 till August 2021, he was Head of Foreign Language Assessment at the Center for Language Teaching Advancement (CeLTA) at MSU. He is also a Research Fellow at the Research Group Language, Education and Society and the Centre for Language and Education (CLE), KU Leuven, Belgium.
Koen is the Curriculum and Assessment Director and Co-Investigator of the Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous Languages Partnership (2016-2023), a Mellon Foundation sponsored project to improve the teaching of less commonly taught languages (LCTL) as well as Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) (watch a short video on our second cycle here) and advance strategic cooperation within the Big Ten Academic Alliance.
Koen is also the Co-PI and Head of Research of the National LCTL Resource Center (NLRC), a Department of Education/Title VI-funded national language resource center. The NLRC started in August 2022 and will continue till July 2025. The mission of the NLRC is to support and develop LCTL education by 1) offering high-quality opportunities for professional learning, 2) creating open and innovative instructional resources, and 3) forging strategic collaborations at the inter-institutional level. Eleven projects in these three focus areas will contribute to LCTL teaching and learning.
Before joining MSU in 2016, Koen worked at the Centre for Language and Education (KU Leuven) for almost 25 years. From 2010 onward, he was an Associate Director of the CLE and the Director of the Certificate of Dutch as a Foreign Language (CNaVT), the international standardized test of Dutch as a Foreign Language.
At the CLE, Koen was involved in the development of task-based language and subject-centered curricula for primary education and in the professional development of teachers and school teams in K-12 education and teacher certification programs. He worked with school teams on topics like vocabulary development, proficiency-based language teaching, task-based language teaching and assessment, and the development of a school language policy.
From 2005 to 2010, Koen worked on his Ph.D. (Supervisor: Dr. Kris Van den Branden) that combined two of his main interests: second language development and knowledge construction.
At KU Leuven, he co-supervised Ph.D. studies together with professor Kris Van den Branden (supervisor) related to second language learning inside and outside school (Dr. Goedele Vandommele), implementation of school language policy (Dr. Lies Strobbe), valorisation of linguistic diversity (Dr. Kathelijne Jordens) and language testing (Dr. Bart Deygers).
Key interests include task-based language teaching and assessment, second language development, content-based language learning, curriculum development, teacher training, language awareness and multilingual education, and language-in-education policy.
Koen is Co-Editor (with Kris Van den Branden, KU Leuven) of TASK. Journal on Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning (John Benjamins), Treasurer of the International Association for Task-Based Language Teaching (IATBLT), member of the Editorial Board of ITL – International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and Individual Expert Member for the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE).
Koen is a member of the TOEFL Committee of Examiners (COE) at Educational Testing Service (ETS) (October 2020-September 2024) and a member of the TOEFL Committee of Examiners Young Student Series Research Subcommittee (October 2020 – September 2023). Koen also serves as a Co-PI for the Center for Standardized Testing in Education in Flanders, Belgium.
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