"Chunking in the Second Language: Implications for Language Learning and Teaching"
Serene Wang
Language Scientist and Educator

Many second language learners attain substantial vocabulary and grammatical knowledge and perform well on standardized proficiency tests, yet they continue to experience difficulty in real-time language use despite years of studying. This discrepancy can be understood from a processing-based perspective, emphasizing the role of chunking in real-time language processing.

Chunking refers to the cognitive process by which smaller elements are grouped into larger units, such as from syllables to words, from words to phrases, and beyond. Differences between first (L1) and second language (L2) learning often lead the latter to rely more heavily on word-by-word processing, constraining comprehension and production in the face of rapid speech rates, transient speech signals, and inherent limitations of the human sensory and working memory systems.

Recent empirical findings suggest that chunking facilitates real-time language processing in L1 and L2 speakers alike. These findings invite a reconsideration of common instructional practices that treat language as a system of knowledge to be studied, emphasizing vocabulary words and grammatical structures as categorically distinct areas of instruction. Instead, I argue that a chunk-based language pedagogy that uses multiword units as important building blocks for language may better support real-time processing skills in L2 learners.

Bio: Dr. Serene Wang is a language scientist and educator. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology (Psycholinguistics) from Cornell University, with her dissertation research focusing on the cognitive science of second language learning, chunking, and processing. Outside of the laboratory, she also worked closely with second language learners and speakers in the classroom and language support settings. During her time at Cornell, she taught a reading and writing course for heritage Chinese speakers, two Mandarin Language Across the Curriculum sections attached to Psychology courses, and facilitated English and Mandarin Conversation Hours at the LRC for three years. Dr. Wang is currently working as a local language instructor in Ithaca, teaching ESL at TST BOCES and Mandarin at Raft Education.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public.

Come and explore international research from students and researchers at the Einaudi Center for International Studies. Our undergraduate Global Scholars will present posters on their international aid projects and our Global Research Fellows will give speed talks on interdisciplinary research.

Global Research Speed Talks

Global Research Fellows will present three-minute speed talks on their interdisciplinary and international research.

Fellows are advanced graduate students, Cornell postdocs, and visiting and local scholars. They network with a diverse group of colleagues and work together to grapple with pressing global challenges. Applications for the next cohort will open in fall 2026.

Global Scholars Showcase

Global Scholars will present a showcase of their capstone projects providing public commentary and perspectives on international aid.

Undergraduate global scholars advocate for building democracy on campus and around the world. They have partnered with Einaudi Center practitioner in residence Paul Kaiser and faculty mentor Ed Mabaya—expert researchers and practitioners on international development—to design their projects. Applications for the next cohort will open in fall 2026.

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The Einaudi Spring Showcase is hosted by the Einaudi Center for International Studies.

International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, Cornell Global Hubs, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell) in partnership with the Language Resource Center.

Register on CampusGroups to receive a reminder. Registration is not required.

This talk will explore the social, environmental, and economic legacies of plywood across the Americas, focusing on Honduras and the U.S. South. During and after World War II, demand for southern pine lumber created patterns of inequality that continue to shape the contemporary world. In 1964, the Georgia Pacific Corporation invented a process to create glued plywood from southern pine, transforming the political economy of forests across the hemisphere. Using ethnographic and archival research in rural Honduras, Arkansas, and Florida, this talk will explore how the search for building materials transformed and connected places across the Americas in surprising ways.

Daniel Reichman is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. A specialist in contemporary Latin America, he earned his PhD from Cornell and has conducted anthropological research in Honduras and Brazil. He is the author of two books, The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras and Progress in the Balance: Mythologies of Development in Santos, Brazil. In addition to his academic writing, he writes for popular media outlets and has spoken on immigration policy at the White House, United Nations, and the Interamerican Development Bank. He is co-editor of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, the longest running anthropology lecture series in North America, which is published by Duke University Press.

"Controvérsias e Breve História Sobre a Linguagem Inclusiva no Brasil"

by

Brume Dezembro Iazzetti

​Ph.D. Student in Science and Technology Studies (STS)

Cornell University

WHEN: April 17, 2026 at 12:20PM (EST)

WHERE: Uris Hall G08

Lecturer in Portuguese.

In person.

Open to the public. Everybody is welcome.

To see the flyer, please click HERE.

Contact:

Dr. Denise Osborne

dmo67@cornell.edu

Senior Lecturer

Romance Studies

Cornell University

Bartels World Affairs Lecture

In this year’s Bartels lecture, Ambassador Samantha Power examines the causes and consequences of dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While reductions in United States foreign assistance have inflicted harm on millions of people, the principal beneficiaries of the cuts, Power contends, are the People’s Republic of China and other governments that prefer to operate without scrutiny or accountability.

Join us as Power outlines a strategy for revitalizing a broad bipartisan coalition to support foreign assistance. To succeed in building resilient aid structures, politicians and stakeholders will need to demonstrate the effectiveness of aid programs to the public. U.S. resources should be used as leverage to secure new commitments from partner countries and mobilize additional investments from allied governments, the private sector, philanthropy, and members of the diaspora.

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Speaker

Ambassador Samantha Power served in the Biden-Harris administration as the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the world’s premier international development agency. She was the 28th U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama-Biden administration. Her first book, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

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About the Bartels World Affairs Lecture

The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Einaudi Center for International Studies. This flagship event brings distinguished international figures to campus each academic year to speak on global topics and meet with Cornell faculty and students, particularly undergraduates. The lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.

A roundtable discussion on centering Indigenous voices in Abiayala (Latin America) with Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, María de los Ángeles Aguilar Velásquez, and Polly Lauer, addressing questions about Indigenous representation both in the media and the field of Latin American Studies. Hosted by the Romance Studies, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, History, the Klarman Program, and the Language Resource Center.

Dr. Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante is a scholar who belongs to the Mapuche people. He is currently president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and an Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Cárcamo-Huechante is also a founding member of the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, a collective of engaged Mapuche researchers based in southern Chile. In 2007, he published his first book, Tramas del mercado: imaginación económica, cultura pública y literatura en el Chile de fines del siglo veinte (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio). His most recently published book is Acoustic Colonialism: Acts of Mapuche Interference (Duke UP, 2025).

Dr. María de los Ángeles Aguilar Velásquez is a Guatemalan Maya K´iche´ historian, whose research centers on the policing and criminalization of Maya Spirituality in Guatemala during the second half of the 20th century. She has worked on collaborative research projects centered on historical memory, collecting testimony from Indigenous communities and genocide survivors. For over nine years, Dr. Aguilar was a columnist in Guatemala’s newspaper elPeriodico, where she wrote about the country’s social and political issues and denounced repressive policies that affected the Maya population. She received her Ph.D. in History from Tulane University in 2021. From 2021 to 2024 she was a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS) at Yale University, where she taught courses on Latin America Studies and Political Violence in Latin America.

Dr. Polly Lauer is an allied scholar who works collaboratively with Maya K'iche' media makers in Guatemala. Her book project, Struggling for Air: The Politics of Resilience in a Maya K’iche’ Radio Station, 1959-2020, documents the history of the oldest Maya K’iche’ radio station in Guatemala. This interdisciplinary project illustrates how Indigenous actors wielded communications technologies to defend language, community, and autonomy through periods of crisis. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American History from Yale University and is an incoming assistant professor of Native American Studies at the University of Montana in Missoula, MT.