Dr Isabel Tasker

Biography

Isabel Tasker joined UNE in 2001 as a Lecturer in Chinese. She is an educator with over three decades of experience teaching Mandarin in Europe and Australia in a variety of modes and contexts: full- and part-time study, adult and community education, university campus-based, and by distance education and online. Her work has involved her in a wide range of curriculum development, assessment, evaluation and teacher-training initiatives at local and national level in the UK and Australia. Dr Tasker’s teaching, research, and service activities are all motivated and linked by a passionate and scholarly commitment as an educator to Chinese language learning, and on a broader scale to advocacy for the benefits of learning languages other than English to develop intercultural awareness and understanding. The outstanding quality of her teaching has been recognised at UNE by the award of the Vice-Chancellor’s Excellence in Learning and Teaching Award,  and nationally by the award of an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Citation for outstanding contributions to student learning. Isabel Tasker’s research interests are in language pedagogy and applied linguistics, and her research makes innovative contributions in both content and methodology.

Dr Tasker has been Coordinator of the Languages and Cultures Grouping within the School of Arts since 2014, and she is currently Course Coordinator for the Bachelor of Languages, the Bachelor of Languages and International Business, and the Diploma of Modern Languages.