De Bot obtained his
PhD degree in general linguistics and applied linguistics in 1982 at the
University of Nijmegen. His PhD research concerned the use of visualizations of intonation as a teaching aid.
In May 1994 he became chair of Applied Linguistics and head of department at the
University of Nijmegen. In November 2002 he became chair of Applied Linguistics at the
University of Groningen. He is a trustee of the TESOL International Research Foundation and a member of the Program Committee of the Department of Modern Languages of
Carnegie Mellon University.
He is co-editor of a series Studies in Bilingualism from
John Benjamins Publishing Company. He has published books and articles in the field of
applied linguistics. He is chair of the board of the School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences in Groningen. He recently acted as guest editor of a special issue on language attrition.of the journal Studies in Bilingualism[4]
He is one of the members of the "Dutch School of Dynamic Systems" who proposed to apply
time-series data to study second language development along with
van Geert,
Lowie, and
Verspoor. His research concerns a number of topics including foreign
language attrition, language and
dementia in multilingual settings, maintenance and shift of minority languages and the psycholinguistics of bilingual language processing, and more recently the application of dynamic systems theory in SLA and multilingualism.
In 2015 de Bot published his first article on
circadian rhythms and second language development,[6] followed by another co-authored article (Fang Fang) in 2017.[7]
In an interview, published in Alkalmazott Nyelvtudomány, (Applied linguistics in Hungarian) de Bot said that he is in interested in the application of
circadian rhythm in
second language acquisition.[9]
Supervision
de Bot has supervised numerous PhD students, including
Wander Lowie,[10] Tal Caspi,[11] and Belinda Chan.[12]