Dr Alimujiang Tusun is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He did his BA in English at Northwest Minzu University (China), an MA in English and Applied Linguistics at Beijing Foreign Studies University (China), before coming to Cambridge where he did an MPhil (with distinction) and a PhD in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, with a focus on Uyghur (a Turkic language) and Mandarin Chinese, and their acquisition by bilingual children. Upon finishing his PhD, he joined the AHRC-funded project ‘Multilingualism: Empowering individuals and transforming societies (MEITS)’ at Cambridge as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, looking at how factors such as age and context (instructed vs. naturalistic) impact on children’s learning of additional languages. Dr Tusun’s research to date has been published in peer-reviewed journals Lingua, Linguistics, Frontiers in Psychology, Language and Cognition, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Dr Tusun has been supervising, since 2014, courses at the Section of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (TAL), University of Cambridge. During the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 academic years, he delivered undergraduate lectures on Language Acquisition and Sociolinguistics at TAL. He also regularly teaches Second Language Acquisition (MA programme) and Regional Varieties of English (BA programme) at Anglia Ruskin University.
Dr Tusun is interested in the relationship between language and cognition, and he explores this by studying how basic human experiential domains such as space, causality, and change of state are represented across languages, and how structural diversity and cognition interact and shape the acquisition/use of one or more languages by children and adults. He is also interested in the philological and linguistic studies of under-represented Turkic languages and is currently working on a monograph on Turkic syntax.