Experience Summary
As a highly-educated native Mandarin speaker with a Master of Arts in Linguistics with a focus on Secondary Language Teaching, I have taught beginning, intermediate, and advanced level courses in Chinese language to English speakers as well as students of other primary languages. I also have more than 2 years of successful tutoring experience. My students range from 8-year-olds to successful adults including writers, businessmen, and senior corporate staff. They have consistently provided positive feedback and have shown significant increase in performance.
Qualifications: solid academic credentials (in addition to having a Master’s in Linguistics, I also completed a professional training course of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language); strong knowledge of Chinese language and culture (I am a lover of Chinese literature and also a popular blogger myself); well-rounded (I was first a Finance major and had a few years management experience in a Chinese bank and I read extensively); talent for integrating thematic units and interactive tasks to build and improve student’s ability to communicate in Chinese language; perceptive when it comes to identifying students' strengths and areas in need of improvement.
Now working at an American bank, I am in the process of getting a certification as a Chinese Language Teacher.
References are available upon request.
Teaching Style
I strongly believe learning is maximized when students are highly interested and feel personally connected to the learning materials and have opportunities to combine their prior and newly-acquired knowledge or skills to complete commutative tasks in real life settings. This is the reason why I advocate and practice personalized learning.
How I personalize learning:
1) Assess and establish an understanding of student's interests, needs, learning style, motivation style, background, strengths, and areas in need of improvement. This is done before a formal lesson.
2) Incorporate what I have learned from the assessment into lesson planning. Spending two to three hours in preparing for an hour lesson, I ensure each lesson is customized to student’s interests, needs, and learning styles. I also put a lot of effort and thought into making my lessons fun and engaging, as I believe learning shouldn't be a bore or a chore!
3) When giving assignments, I take two goals into consideration: ensure desired learning outcome is achieved; be able to interest and engage students. My students find my assignments fun and exciting! They sometimes ask for more!
4) Give thought to and adjust my teaching method and style to suit the student’s needs and motivation to ensure students are highly engaged and progressing towards their goals.
My Hobbies
Writing in Chinese( I am a popular column blogger who writes about culture differences between China and western countries);reading.