Staff profile

Qian Sun is a doctoral student at the school of Education, Durham University. She is supervised by Professor Nadin Beckmann and Assistant Professor Xiaofei Qi. Before her PhD, Qian Sun completed her undergraduate degree at Yunnan Normal university in China, she has also completed a Master degree programme at University of Leicester. She used to be a teacher at a Chinese university majoring in early childhood education from 2020-2022,She taught the courses ''Educational Psychology'' and ''Oral Expression of Children''.

Her PhD research aims to investigate foreign language anxiety and psychological adjustment processes in a target language environment from a longitudinal perspective. As such, she studies English speaking anxiety and psychological adjustment, as well as personality, from both trait and state perspectives. Through this study, she hopes to contribute to a better understanding of international students' psychological adjustment trajectories as they study abroad, including their English-speaking anxiety outside the classroom, which is understudied. Besides, she hopes to develop a better understanding of the factors that contribute to psychological adjustment difficulties and English-speaking anxiety, and of possible effective coping strategies international students could adopt.

• Psychological adjustment
• Personality traits
• Foreign language anxiety
• Foreign language acquisition
• Longitudinal studies