Teaching Statement & Course Evaluations

LC111-LC311 Course Evaluations ; LC420 Course Evaluation;LC511 Course Evaluation

My teaching is grounded in the belief that language learning should help students use Chinese meaningfully and confidently while cultivating reflective, critical awareness of culture, identity, and global citizenship. In every course I teach—whether introductory or advanced, in-person or online—I strive to create learning environments where students feel inclusive and supported, unleash their creativity, challenge their stereotypes, and see themselves as multilingual, intercultural speakers who can navigate complexity with empathy, openness, and joy.

Communicative and Technology-Enhanced Teaching at the Introductory Level (in person & online)

At the introductory level, I adopt a standards-based communicative language teaching (CLT) approach because I believe the key to successful language learning is helping students use Chinese effectively and appropriately in real-life contexts. My primary goal is to develop learners’ functional proficiency and pragmatic competence—the ability to communicate appropriately across situations and interlocutors. Grammar is taught inductively through the PACE model (Presentation, Attention, Co-construction, Extension), where new structures are introduced in meaningful contexts, analyzed for form and meaning, and extended through communicative practice. To make learning purposeful and engaging, I design task-based activities such as role-plays, information-gap exchanges, interviews, and storytelling. These tasks allow students to negotiate meaning, solve problems collaboratively, and apply language to authentic situations drawn from their own lives.

I also emphasize pragmatic awareness—for example, how to make requests, show gratitude, or decline politely in culturally appropriate ways—because linguistic accuracy alone does not guarantee communicative success. Recognizing the limitations of many beginner-level textbooks, which often lack spontaneous and varied language input, I developed a research-informed self-paced learning pragmatics website that teaches different speech acts with authentic videos to compensate for the absence of natural language in lower-level textbooks. Learners observe culturally appropriate behaviors, learn authentic communication phrases, and rehearse using different strategies in real-life role-play settings involving various combinations of contextual factors (e.g., relative ages and status), both on the website and in the classroom.I am grateful that this website won the First Prize of the Cengage Award in Innovative Teaching by the Chinese Language Teaching Association.

With the support of the distance learning office at Boston University, I developed Boston University’s first fully interactive online Chinese courses (LC111OL and LC112OL) by building materials from scratch. The courses follow a three-part interactive model that combines asynchronous preview modules, synchronous live sessions, and community-based intercultural projects. These components work together to support the three ACTFL modes of communication. To promote learner autonomy, I implemented a gameful learning system grounded in Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000), offering flexible assignment choices and digital badges for engagement. I also foster a strong sense of community using the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001). In Slack, students share self-created memes, reflections, and stories connected to unit themes—transforming interaction into authentic, student-driven dialogue.

I believe that online language classrooms can also foster critical cultural awareness and intercultural communication competence. Therefore, I paired students with native speakers and assigned them a community inquiry project in which they participate in virtual intercultural exchanges and complete collaborative projects together. My broader online teaching efforts earned the ACTFL Online Teaching Award.

Transformative and Experiential Learning through Local and Global Community Learning

A key learning outcome in this world language curriculum is decentering one's assumptions about other cultures and navigating cultural differences of all kinds, which aligns with UNESCO's sustainable development goal of promoting peaceful and inclusive societies, the leading intercultural competence models (e.g., Kramsch, 2011; Byram, 2021), world language standards (ACTFL, 2017), as well as the emerging Transformative Language Learning and Teaching paradigm that encourages change in learners’ perspectives (Leaver, 2021). As a language educator, I constantly ask myself, how can I cultivate global citizens who are able to challenge prior assumptions and promote understanding of cultures at the local scale? Perspectives, especially stereotypes, are hard to eliminate (Borghetti, 2013) and the world language curriculum is often tied to nation-states, neglecting the diverse localized cultures, which may reinforce cultural stereotypes. For instance, a popular Chinese textbook in the US, introduces Chinese food culture by categorizing staples as being consumed in the south (rice) or the north (noodles, dumplings, Chinese steamed bread), overlooking the rich culinary practices found within different cities and towns in both regions. Such an essentialist representation of culture inadvertently reinforces stereotypes. How can my students learn about those plural local cultures and mindsets when national cultures overshadow the varied localized ones?

To address this challenge and facilitate learners at all proficiency levels to challenge assumptions, I adopted a critical approach of virtual exchange. Virtual Exchange (VE) is a pedagogical approach which involves the engagement of groups of learners in extended periods of online intercultural interaction and collaboration with partners from other cultural contexts or geographical locations as an integrated part of their educational programmes and under the guidance of educators and/or expert facilitators (O’Dowd, 2018). The benefits of VE are the development of foreign language competence, intercultural skills, digital literacy (Helm, 2016) and prepare learners for the globalised digital workplace (Crawford, 2021). Furthermore, VE is an internationalization at home approach that copes with the inability to offer physical mobility or study abroad programs (Beelen & Jones, 2015).

My collaboration with Jingjing An from Tianjin university of Technology has lasted for 11 terms since Fall 2020. These critical VE projects are semester-long projects ranging from 6-week summer term projects to 15-week spring/fall semester projects. In these past 8 terms, BU participants have generated about 800 hours of video zoom conversations in Chinese and English, more than 300 informal email exchanges, about 1600 reflection journal entries in Chinese and English, and about 300 digital storytelling projects in Chinese. Students from Tianjin University of Technology have generated an equal number of video conversations and about 300 reflection journals. BU course participants included Chinese college students from BU, high school students, professionals, and students beyond the Boston area. The student body from Tianjin University of Technology 天津理工大学 exhibits both the majority group (Han people 汉族) and ethnic minority groups (e.g., Uyghurs 维吾尔族, Man 满族, Gan 赣族, Yi, 彝族).  

In the novice to intermediate levels （LC111-LC112OL-LC211), students participate in critical place-based VE to navigate diverse localized cultures: Students can demonstrate their intercultural and linguistic competence through pre-VE preparation (listening/reading interpretation mode of communication tasks), weekly VE online video meetings (interpersonal communication tasks based on unit goals), post-VE written reflection journals (intercultural reflection) and an end of semester multimodal storytelling project which are shared with the larger community (presentational communication). 

In LC319 Chinese through intercultural communication （LC319 实用汉语：跨文化交际）, I implemented critical cultural hypothesis refinement project-based VE in LC319 to cultivate critical perspectives. Students have conducted a culture stereotype/hypothesis refinement project to obtain the learning outcomes of the course: interpreting authentic reading/listening and cultural materials, interacting with native speakers appropriately as well as explaining diversity among products, practices and how it relates to perspectives in both written and oral forms. The project begins with learners’ initial statement of stereotype/assumption about Chinese culture, followed by online research about the topic, VE meetings, and discussions with multiple Chinese native speakers, and ends with a reflection to either reject or expand original assumption and the creation of an artifact shared with the public audience. 

Students in advanced level media Chinese class (LC420 新闻汉语：互联网时代的中国) engage in a critical news editing project-based VE to develop global citizenship and examine media bias. Together with their native speaking partner, through selecting, summarizing, discussing multiple reports from different sources (western and Chinese media) in both English and Chinese, students are provided with the opportunity to demonstrate global citizenship outcomes (1. identify media bias 2. compare peer opinions and challenge your assumptions) and advanced language skills (1. interpret news and authentic materials; 2. summarize, orally or in writing, news in your own words; 3. support your points of views with evidence). 

The impact of these projects has been profound. Students frequently report transformative changes in their understanding of Chinese society and culture. For example, students revised assumptions about cities such as Wuhan, discovered unfamiliar regions such as Hami and its Uyghur culture, and reflected critically on social stereotypes. Some students even confronted racial stereotypes through dialogue with Chinese peers and developed genuine cross-cultural friendships.

I also integrate linguistic landscape projects into my teaching. Linguistic landscape refers to the language of public signs such as billboards, street names, store signs, and government signage (Landry & Bourhis, 1997). These projects allow students to connect classroom learning with the multilingual and multimodal realities of urban spaces.Working in Boston—one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the United States—I encourage students to explore how Chinese and other languages appear in public spaces such as Chinatown or Allston. Students analyze character forms, compare traditional and simplified Chinese, investigate audience and community context, and reflect on sociolinguistic meanings.

Through these discoveries, students come to see that language is visual, spatial, and political. These experiences embody what the Modern Language Association envisions: graduates with translingual and transcultural competence who can interpret and create meaning across languages, modalities, and communities. My community learning initiatives were recognized with the ACTFL Global Engagement Award.

Content-Based and Differentiated Learning at the Advanced Level

At the advanced level, I design courses grounded in Content-Based Instruction (CBI), which research shows promotes language development, content learning, and student motivation.

In LC319: Chinese through Intercultural Communication, students explore themes such as identity, multilingualism, values, and stereotypes through authentic texts, films, and digital media. To guide cultural analysis, I employ the IMAGE model (Glisan & Donato, 2010), which moves students from observation of cultural products and practices to deeper interpretations of cultural perspectives.For example, in a unit on Qu Yuan and the Dragon Boat Festival, students begin with visual observations, read narratives about Qu Yuan, discuss his symbolic role in Chinese culture, and compare perspectives on heroism and collectivism with cultural heroes from their own backgrounds. Students also act as cultural investigators through case studies, media analyses, and community-based learning. In LC420: Media Chinese—China in the Digital Age, where students come from diverse majors such as international relations, media studies, and computer science, I designed a news-editing virtual exchange project. Students select and analyze multiple news articles, receive instructor feedback, discuss perspectives with peers, collaborate with Chinese partners, and produce multimodal news stories. These projects foster differentiated learning pathways while also developing critical media literacy. Students learn to evaluate sources, identify bias, and seek perspectives across languages and cultures.Through these experiences, students expand their linguistic competence while also developing the capacity to question narratives, recognize bias, and engage with diverse perspectives as informed global citizens.

Conclusion

As a language teacher, I want students to leave my classes not only more proficient in Chinese, but also more curious, confident, and compassionate in how they engage with the world. Whether students are discussing social issues with Chinese peers or interpreting a street sign in Chinatown, I hope they experience the thrill of discovery, the beauty of communication, and the richness of cultural diversity.

Teaching Chinese is not just teaching a language—it is teaching a way of seeing, listening, and understanding. My greatest joy is watching my students transform: from beginners into expressive speakers, from observers into intercultural thinkers, and from learners into bridge builders. That transformation—the moment when language becomes connection—is why I teach.