Rod Ellis is a professor of the Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He received a doctorate from the University of London. In addition, he is a chair professor of the eighth batch of the Changjiang Scholar Program issued by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China. His research interests include: second language acquisition and teaching, teacher education, course design and methodology of language teaching. He is honored as the "father of the second language teaching". He has published many books in the field of second language acquisition, which are widely adopted by domestic applied linguistics. For example, Understanding Second Language Acquisition (awarded BAAL prize by British Association of Applied Linguists in 1986), The Study of Second Language Acquisition (awarded the Duke of Edinburgh prize for the best book in applied linguistics in 1995), Task-based Language Learning and Teaching, Analyzing Learner Language, and so forth.