Liling Huang

Liling Huang is the Chinese Language Program Coordinator at Boston University (BU) and Chair of ACTFL’s Teaching Language and Culture Special Interest Group. She teaches Chinese at all proficiency levels and has developed multiple content-based, online, and graduate-level pedagogy courses. Prior to joining BU, she taught at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.

Her teaching innovations have received national recognition, including the ACTFL Global Engagement Award for intercultural virtual exchange projects, the ACTFL Online Teaching Award and Blackboard Exemplary Course Award for online and blended Chinese curricula, the CLTA–Cengage Innovative Excellence in Teaching Award for teaching Chinese pragmatics, and the ACTFL Research Priorities Grant for her dissertation on intercultural transformative learning through critical virtual exchange.

Her research focuses on intercultural communication education, critical virtual exchange, and technology-enhanced language learning. She has presented at major international conferences (AAAL, ACTFL, CLTA, CALICO), conducted teacher-training workshops, and published in venues such as Foreign Language Annals and Routledge. She also shares Chinese language and culture through her educational YouTube channel, Happy Chinese with Liling and her self-paced learning website Practical Chinese.

Her current work explores intercultural citizenship through service learning, integrating the UN Sustainable Development Goals into language curricula, and decolonizing Chinese language education by incorporating diverse linguistic and regional perspectives.