Bio

Since I joined Carnegie Mellon University as a teaching-track faculty member in 2005, I have primarily worked on the language curriculum. My curricular work has been guided by, among others, Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century and ACTFL proficiency guidelines. I first classified learning activities into three categories: classroom activities, homework and project. Then I have developed teaching materials for those activities and organized them in the sequence of interpretive (reading and listening comprehension), interpersonal (small group discussion) and presentational (discussion summary and presentation) within the framework of communicative modes. The materials also integrate three of the five Cs - communication, cultures and comparisons - to promote transcultural as well as translingual competence. Culture instruction is thus as essential as language instruction and is embedded in it by using language to learn the similarities and differences between the target culture and students’ own. It is also based on the trichotomy of cultural elements: products, practices and perspectives. As in any other rational inquiry, culture instruction seeks to unearth the unobservable (perspectives) through close examination of the observable (products and practices). Students are expected to understand the similarities and differences between the two cultures at the levels of products, practices and perspectives.

Department Member Since 2005