"The 2014 Virginia STARTALK Chinese Teacher Academy has provided me with professional development of teaching strategies, curriculum design, and performance-based assessment successfully. This program gave me a chance to further examine my own teaching philosophy and instruction through a series of intensive teaching practices."

Reminiscence: 

"The 2014 Virginia STARTALK Chinese Teacher Academy has provided me with professional development of teaching strategies, curriculum design, and performance-based assessment successfully. This program gave me a chance to further examine my own teaching philosophy and instruction through a series of intensive teaching practices. During and after teaching practices, I acquired more valuable suggestions from Dr. Tseng, the instructors, and other teachers which benefited me to bring better teaching strategies to my classroom. The cooperation with other teachers to design the thematic unit can be a good opportunity for me since I obtained a variety of teaching ideas and suggestions in the groups. Moreover, I have learned about how to implement some effective strategies in my future classroom including student-centered instruction, 100% target language teaching, communicative activates as well as back backward design in planning from Dr. Tseng’s and the other instructors. This intensive training program has allowed me to teach Chinese language in context rather than only vocabulary lexical and grammatical knowledge emphasized. Dr. Tseng and the instructors guided me to make a change in my language teaching step by step that focusing on developing communicative drills with meaningful language usage, utilizing authentic materials and comprehensible input not merely paying attention to meaningful dills or repetition without cultural contexts. I did appreciate that this program helped me to develop this awareness of teaching language with purpose and learning language with meaningful."