Charlene Polio


Charlene Polio is an American linguist. She is currently a professor and associate chair at the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages at the Michigan State University, The United States. Her research focuses on second language acquisition with a special focus on second language writing.
Along with Cumming, Hyland, Kormos, Matsuda, Manchón, Ortega, Storch and Verspoor, Polio is considered as one of the most prominent researchers on second language writing.

Career

Polio obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics in 1983 and her Master of Arts degree in TESOL in 1984 at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1992 she obtained her PhD in Applied linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Polio was the co-editor of The Modern Language Journal.
She is co-editor of TESOL Quarterly along with Peter De Costa.
Since April 2018 she has been a member-at-large of the American Association for Applied Linguistics.

Research

Polio's research focuses on second language writing with a special focus on language complexity. She is noted for her research synthesis on accuracy measures, published in Language Learning in 1997. She identified three different types of accuracy measures: holistic scores, error-free units, and error counts.

Books