2011

Yao

The first week was tough for me since we had a lot of theory, reading, and reflection. The second week was tougher for me since I had to let go of what I have done in the past years in the classroom, and be ready to adopt and accept new best practices in my teaching. I was lucky since I had Tseng Laoshi, two great teachers, two teammates, and other kind classmates. They answered my questions when I asked, they offered help before I requested. With everyone’s help, my third time teaching was the best out of three.

Xu

The 3-week UVa STARTALK program was not just a highly productive and organized teacher-training program, I truly enjoyed interacting with all people there - each family member (including teachers, guest speakers, assistants, peers, and students) was so unique, sincere, talented, vivid, warm and supportive.

The most enjoyable and memorable experiences were as follows:

1. Dr. Tseng’s lectures, demo lessons, energy, comments and caring attitude;

2. Dr. Tseng’s family members’ active participation and support;

Reeder

Before this training did I believe that, hypothetically, “one can teach novice students to speak Mandarin after just 20+ hours of instruction”? I did, but not without doubts. Now that the practicum is over; yes, I do believe it’s attainable and am not skeptical anymore. And the best part of the teacher training course was that I gained so much knowledge about teaching Mandarin in a class setting, and it met my highest expectations. This intensive 3- week program surpassed any other graduate courses I have had from all the past summers.

Pearson

I enjoyed being a student again in the 2011 Virginia STARTALK Chinese Teacher Academy at the University of Virginia after finishing my third year of teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language at Fairview Elementary, Fairfax County. It has been really interesting going back to the academic world and I had such a different experience this time around after going through various STARTALK programs in the region in the past few years.

Mao

UVA STARTALK is a wonderful program. This summer Dr. Tseng, Ming Laoshi and Shi Laoshi did an amazing job helping me become a better Chinese teacher. I liked the teaching practicums because I made progress teaching and designing more interesting activities. But there are still things I need to improve, including:

Lin

Before I went to Virginia for the 2011Virginia STARTALK Chinese Teacher Academy, I thought that I was a good teacher because my principal and students told me so. However, during the training, I realized that I actually have a lot of room to improve and become a better teacher. The most important thing I learned in the program is that I need to implement research-supported best practices such as comprehensible input, target language (in other words, using Chinese to teach Chinese), authentic materials, authentic tasks, and communicative instruction.

Hsu-Kelkis

I really appreciated having the opportunity to participate in this year’s three week UVA STARTALK program. This opportunity not only has encouraged and strengthened me to be an excellent Chinese language teacher but also has given me opportunities to make new friends. Meeting new friends and exchanging professional knowledge of teaching Chinese with others has brought all of the participants closer as a team and even as a big community. Professor Tseng encouraged us to be more open-minded and to create a great learning/sharing community from the very first day of the program.

Hsu

Before and After

Hsiao

Life-long learning is always my goal. I believe that continued learning is the key to become a successful teacher. Therefore, I devoted three weeks of my summer time to the University of Virginia (UVa) for professional development.

Before I attended the program at UVa, I’d heard that its Chinese-teacher training program was intensive. I did not believe it. In my bag, I packed a lot of personal belongings such as CDs and VCDs and I planned to watch these during my leisure time at UVa.

Guo

I have learned a lot in this 100% immersion program. It is amazing to see the increase in students’ language output from novice low to novice high in a mere 24 hour immersion program (3 hours a day, 5 days a week). At the beginning of STARTALK, I doubted whether the students would be able to grasp so much information and approppriate so much language output in such a short time.

Before and After

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