Dr. Li-Jen Kuo was born to a Taigi-speaking father and a Foochow-speaking mother in Taiwan. Her paternal family immigrated from China to Taiwan during the Qing dynasty. They lived in Taiwan through the Japanese colonial period and, therefore, also spoke Japanese in addition to Taigi. Her maternal grandparents immigrated from Fujian, China to Taiwan during the late 1940s. They spoke Foochow at home and learned Mandarin-Chinese at school.

While Dr. Kuo grew up in a multicultural and multilingual family, due to the Mandarin-only language policy at the time in Taiwan, Mandarin Chinese became her and her brother’s dominant language in childhood. During the 1990s, with the lifting of martial law and democratization of Taiwan, cultural and linguistic diversity was gradually recognized and encouraged, and multilingual awareness became a cornerstone of language policy. Today, heritage language education is fully integrated into the national curriculum. The heritage languages Taiwanese children learn at school include not only Chinese dialects, but also languages of the indigenous people and recent immigrants. Dr. Kuo believes multilingual awareness is an essential component of literacy education in any multicultural society. 

Dr. Kuo completed her undergraduate study in Foreign Languages and Literatures with a minor in German studies at the National Taiwan University. She then came to the U.S. for graduate studies. She completed her M.A. in Language, Learning, and Policy at Stanford University under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Kamil, who was a member of the National Reading Panel and chaired the panel’s subgroups for reading comprehension and for technology. She completed her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology with an emphasis on Cognitive Science of Teaching and Learning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she studied with Dr. Richard C. Anderson, a member of the National Academy of Education and past president of the American Educational Research Association. His book, Becoming a Nation of Readers (1985, with Elfrieda Hiebert, Judith A. Scott, and Ian A. G. Wilkinson), is one of the most widely read books of all time in the field of literacy and has more than 2,000 citations.

Dr. Kuo is immensely grateful to her academic mentors. They serve as her role models as she mentors the next generation of young scholars. 

Fascinated by language sciences, Dr. Kuo obtained a second M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and further developed her expertise in linguistics at four Linguistic Society of America Summer Institutes: Heinrich-Heine University (Düsseldorf, Germany, 2002), Michigan State University (as a fellow, 2003), MIT and Harvard (as a fellow, 2005), and Stanford University (2007).  

Dr. Kuo started her academic career at Northern Illinois University, where she was an Assistant and an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, as well as a Research Associate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Language and Literacy. She was a National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow from 2008-2010. 

Dr. Kuo joined Texas A&M University as an Associate Professor in Literacy Education in 2013 and directs the Cross-Linguistic Literacy and Cognition (CLIC) Research Group*, TAMU World Languages Academy, and TAMU World Languages Teacher Academy.

*  Formerly the Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) Research Group 

Dr. Kuo is married with two school-aged children. Dr. Kuo’s husband is also from Taiwan and his family is Hakka-speaking. Her daughter, Cynthia, is a violinist, and her son, Sherwin, is an origami artist. 

During her limited free time, Dr. Kuo enjoys exploring children’s and youth’s literature in Chinese, English, and German. She also introduces her children to classical Chinese (Old Chinese or Literary Chinese) literature, including Tang Shih (poetry from the Tang dynasty, 618-907 AD), Song Ci (lyric poetry from the Song dynasty, 960-1279 AD), and philosophical works by Lao Tzu (6th-century BCE), Zhuangzi (476-221BC), Confucius (551-479 BCE) and Mencius (372-289 BC). 

Dr. Kuo strives to create opportunities for her children to become global citizens and develop multicultural, multilingual, and multiliterate skills.  Both Cynthia and Sherwin are trilingual in Chinese, English, and German and have reached literacy skills comparable to native speakers in these three languages. They have both learned Korean at the World Language Academy, directed by Dr. Kuo, and are learning Latin and Ancient Greek through their third language, German. 

In 2024, Cynthia, distinguished by her multilingual and multicultural background, stood out among over 1,500 applicants and was chosen as one of the five individuals to serve on the youth jury at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival.

Dr. Kuo is an avid runner and has completed several half and full marathons.

When Dr. Kuo’s children are older, and she has more free time, she wishes to refresh her French and Japanese and relearn her “mother tongue,” Foochow, and her “father tongue,” Taigi. She also wishes to learn Arabic, as some of her best friends are Arabic-speaking.