Dr Dan Davidson

Dan Davidson is senior academic advisor and President Emeritus of the American Councils for International Education, and the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR)'s Executive Director. He has held leadership roles in a number of international organizations and educational initiatives. He is the co-founder and chair of the Center for Education, Assessment and Teaching Methods (CEATM) in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), served as Vice President of the International Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature (MAPRYAL) and as Vice-Chair of the Board of Governors of the European Humanities University. In the U.S., he served as elected Chairman of the Alliance for International Educational and Cultural Exchange. He was the elected President of the Joint National Committee for Language (JNCL) from 2008-2012, the chair of the World Language Academic Advisory Committee of the College Board from 2012-2015, and the president of the ACTR.

Dan Davidson's research focusses on Language in Higher Education, Adult Second Language Acquisition, Language Learning in Immersion Environments, Language Acquisition and Intercultural Development, and Language Assessment. He has authored and edited numerous books, including a twenty-year longitudinal study of adult second language acquisition during study abroad and the Russian: Stage One textbook series, the first collaborative Soviet-American Russian language textbook, which continues to be used in its revised form today. He has written several scholarly articles covering the disciplines of historical semantics (“N.M. Karamzin and the New Critical Vocabulary: Toward a Semantic History of the Term Romantic in Russian,” 1974), lexical pragmatics (“The Bilingual Associative Dictionary of the Languages of Russian an American Youth,” 2004), and second-language acquisition (“The Development of L2 Proficiency and Literacy within the context of the Federally Supported Overseas Language Training Programs for Americans,” 2014). In 2016, he published “Assessing Language Proficiency and Intercultural Development in the Overseas Immersion Context.”