Maw Maw Tun
Maw Maw Tun is a founding member of Arakan College, where she currently serves as a Provost. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in Instructional Technology at Northern Illinois University (NIU) and works as a Senior Burmese Lecturer at the Australian National University (ANU). Passionate about language teaching and learning, Tun has built an extensive academic career since 2009, beginning as a language instructor in the English Department at Dagon University in Myanmar. In pursuit of further studies, she joined the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) program, which led her to earn an M.A. in TESOL from Northern Illinois University. Her master’s thesis on learners’ willingness to participate in language classes received the Outstanding Thesis Award from NIU in 2021.
Tun has taught Burmese at all academic levels, serving as a Teaching Assistant at Northern Illinois University (2018–2024) and as a Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2019–2022). Her dedication to supporting education in Myanmar also led her to serve as a Teaching Fellow at the Virtual Federal University, where she taught academic reading and writing to students affected by political unrest. In 2024, she worked as a Research Professional with the Myanmar Higher Education Educators’ Training Program at Arizona State University. Additionally, she has participated in numerous professional development workshops through the Southeast Asian Language Council (SEALC) and has contributed to the development of Burmese language proficiency materials. She is a certified ILR/OPI Burmese language tester and is currently collaborating on a U.S. Department of Education-funded project to create an open educational resource (OER) textbook for Burmese instruction.
Her research focuses on technology integration in education, particularly in language learning. She co-authored Intricate but Often Overlooked Challenges of Elementary Students’ Programming with Educational Robotics: A Case Study (2024) and a forthcoming article on interactive AI-based spoken dialogue systems, to be published in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (April 2025).