Koen Van Gorp is Assistant Professor of TESOL and Second Language Studies 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 a Research Fellow at the Research Group Language, Education and Society and the Centre for Language and Education (CLE), KU Leuven, Belgium.
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. He was Assessment and Curriculum Director on the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) Partnership, an Andrew W. Mellon grant, from 2016 till 2024, and served as LCTL Coordinator for the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures from Fall 2021 till Spring 2025.
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.
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), He is involved in the International Association for Task-Based Language Teaching (IATBLT) – as Governor of the non-profit organization, 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 the Chair of the TOEFL Committee of Examiners (COE) at Educational Testing Service (ETS) (October 2024 – September 2027) and a member of the TOEFL COE Research Subcommittee (October 2024 – September 2027). Koen also serves as a Co-PI for the Center for Standardized Testing in Education in Flanders, Belgium.
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