DrCaitríona Osborne

Dr Caitríona Osborne is an Assistant Professor in the Irish Institute for Chinese Studies. She completed her PhD in Dublin City University whereby she examined the effectiveness of various teaching approaches on beginner learners of Chinese as a foreign language, with a particular focus on character learning. Caitríona collaborates with scholars in Ireland, the UK, China, and the USA in various research papers on the topic of teaching and learning Chinese, and introduces her students to aspects of these teaching approaches in order to assist them in their learning. One such method involves the use of different colours to write characters which she is also currently examining in further research. 

Apart from research into teaching approaches, Caitríona has also co-authored papers on the presence of translanguaging in the classroom, the use of machine translation in the classroom, and the future of learning Chinese online. She has recently co-edited a book to this end, entitled: Teaching Chinese Characters in the Digital Age: Insights on Current Trends and Future Directions.

She currently teaches Chinese as a foreign language to beginner learners in UCD, while she also teaches the Research Methodologies and Critical Thinking module associated with the Master's in Teaching Chinese Language and Culture and coordinates the Dissertation module. 

She is a committee member of the Irish Association of Chinese Teaching, the Media Coordinator of the Irish Association of Applied Linguistics, and is currently an external advisor for the Teaching Council for Mandarin Chinese. She is also the Assistant Editor of the Chinese as a Second Language Research journal (since 2022).

In 2022, Caitríona was awarded a college-level Teaching Excellence Award for her contribution to educational excellence in UCD (she was also nominated by students in 2023-2024 but was ineligible to progress due to the previous cycle win). She is a Level 1 EDI Ambassador.

Caitríona is currently accepting applications from prospective PhD students in the area of teaching and learning Chinese as a foreign/second language, translation and/or translanguaging. Interested applicants are encouraged to email her with a CV and a research proposal.