About

Phillips S Cao, M.D., is a board-certified family medicine physician and an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida College of Medicine – Jacksonville. He completed his residency in family medicine at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Utica, New York, where he was awarded The William J. Zombek, MD, Memorial Award for excellence in clinical performance, quality patient care, and positive mannerism towards patients. Dr. Cao has published many papers related to Alzheimer’s disease. He is a first-generation American and is fluent in English and Vietnamese. Outside of his professional duties, he enjoys spending time with his wife and toddler son. He currently serves as Medical Director at UF Health Family Medicine – Baymeadows and teaches courses such as Family Medicine and Ambulatory Care Clerkship.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Mathematics education
• Philosophy
• Pedagogy

Selected publications

• More Than Numbers: Unpacking the Language Demands of Secondary Mathematics Word Problems

  Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy · 2026-05-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Solving mathematics word problems is a complex task, particularly for emergent bilingual students, who must navigate both mathematical reasoning and substantial linguistic complexity. In this study, we developed a codebook to analyze the linguistic features of 40 math word problems from a 9th‐grade Algebra textbook and identified the frequent occurrences of the linguistic components at both the lexical and syntactic levels. The analysis revealed frequent occurrences of dense noun phrases, technical terminology, polysemous words, and embedded clause structures—features that require considerable linguistic processing before students can access the underlying mathematical ideas. Such demands are especially consequential for emergent bilingual learners, whose mathematical competence may be obscured by the complexity of the language rather than the mathematics itself. The codebook developed in this study also offers math and ELA/ESOL teachers a practical tool for identifying and anticipating these comprehension challenges, enabling them to design instruction and scaffolds that support students in unpacking the language demand of math word problems. This study concludes with a discussion of pedagogical and research implications for educators who share the responsibility of supporting students, especially emergent bilingual students, in developing content‐area literacy skills essential for success in solving math problems.

  PublisherDOI

• Effects of Pictures on Second-Grade Children’s Oral Reading Performance

  Reading & Writing Quarterly · 2024-11-14

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Genre and Register Features of Sixth-Grade Students’ Factual Writing

  Written Communication · 2022 · 2 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Linguistics

  Factual writing is a key macrogenre of American K-12 schooling that is also valued in workplace and society. This study examined the genre and register features of two subgenres of factual writing—biography and report—composed by 48 sixth-grade students in a curriculum unit on scientists and science-related careers aimed at developing students’ understanding of the nature of science. These texts were analyzed for a range of schematic, lexical, and grammatical features that instantiate the two target genres. Statistical and descriptive analyses revealed that the students demonstrated a fairly mature control over the schematic and lexical features that realize the purpose of either genre and relied heavily on the grammatical resources characteristic of everyday registers in constructing both genres. Additionally, there was a positive relationship between the students’ genre/register familiarity and the holistic quality of their writing, and the students’ reading proficiency was a significant predictor of their genre familiarity and holistic writing quality, but not their register understanding. These findings suggest that learning the grammatical resources characteristic of academic registers remains a major and potentially daunting task for many adolescents.

  PublisherDOI

• Nominal complexities in school children’s informational writing

  Journal of English for Academic Purposes · 2021 · 12 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Mathematics education
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Language and meaning making: Register choices in seventh- and ninth-grade students' factual writing

  Linguistics and Education · 2020 · 19 citations

  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Zhihui Fang

  Puer University

  4 shared

• Valerie Gresser

  Duquesne University

  2 shared

• Jack Zheng

  University of Florida

  1 shared

• Huibin Zhang

  Anhui Agricultural University

  1 shared

• Nate Murray

  Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• The William J. Zombek, MD, Memorial Award