Ms Maw Maw Tun

Maw Maw Tun is a Burmese Lecturer at the School of Culture, History and Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Instructional Technology at Northern Illinois University. She has served in language education since 2009 in various capacities which include English Lecturer at Dagon University (2009-2018), Burmese Teaching Assistant at Northern Illinois University (2018-2024), and Burmese Instructor at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI), University of Wisconsin-Madison (2019-2022). Her multidisciplinary academic background stems from her shift from English language teaching to Burmese language instruction and instructional technology over the past decade. This evolution was in part, precipitated by her involvement as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (2014) and her subsequent pursuit of an M.A. in TESOL at Northern Illinois University (2018-2020), fuelled by an ethos of cultural preservation and educational accessibility, particularly for less commonly taught languages.

Her research expertise in the intersection of instructional technology, language education, and learner anxiety (including AI-based spoken language tools and Virtual Reality applications) has led to invitations to publish and present conference papers. Collaborations include co-developing an interactive AI-based Spoken Dialog System for Burmese and Indonesian, with findings scheduled for publication in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (April 2025). She also co-authored research on robotics in language education "Intricate but Often Overlooked Challenges of Elementary Students' Programming with Educational Robotics: A Case Study" and her master's thesis on learners' willingness to participate in class received the Outstanding Thesis Award from Northern Illinois University in 2021.

Her work with the Southeast Asian Language Council (SEALC) includes contributions to five proficiency development materials for listening and reading skills. She is a certified ILR/OPI Burmese language tester and serves as co-principal investigator on a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education's International Research and Studies Program to develop an open educational resource interactive textbook for Burmese language instruction, due for public release in 2025. Her success in securing this grant, along with her work on the Myanmar Higher Education Educators' Training Program at Arizona State University, has prepared her to actively seek external funding to support innovative projects and collaborate with fellow scholars and students.