Biography

Heidi Shi (Shi Hui 石慧) is currently a second-year Ph.D. student majoring in Chinese linguistics in the EALL (East Asian Languages and Literatures) Department of UO. Besides the doctoral degree, she is also currently working on an M.A. degree in LTS (Language Teaching Specialization) in the Linguistics Department, wishing to train herself into a qualified language teacher at the college level. Heidi’s research interests include Language and Gender, Neologism, Chinese Pedagogy and so forth. She has enthusiasm and experience in teaching Mandarin Chinese at both Novice and Advanced levels.

Originally from Shanghai, China, Heidi spent 2 years living in Japan as well as 6 years studying and working in South Korea before she moved to the United States in 2015. Besides getting a Bachelor’s in Economics and a Master’s in International Studies and East Asian Studies, she has spent most of her spare time during her 20’s traveling in Europe, Asia and America. Her identity as a global citizen is her intrinsic motivation that drives her to make efforts in the field of language teaching and cross-cultural communication. She believes that Language is not merely putting sounds, symbols, and gestures in order to communicate with another community. From a cognitive perspective, language is how we present and express ourselves as individuals, communities, and nations. Heidi also believes that culture refers to a dynamic social system in which conventionalized patterns of behavior, beliefs, and values are integrated. Therefore, her teaching philosophy is: language acquisition should always be closely connected with acculturation because culture provides the environment in which a language is developed, used and interpreted. She is also firmly convinced that teaching and learning languages can promote cultural exchange and cross-cultural understanding, which in the long run, may facilitate international collaboration or even the realization of world peace.

Heidi’s Work as a GE (Graduate Employee)

Since Fall 2015, Heidi has been working as a GE at UO. Her GE work contains 4 types of assignments.

First, she has been teaching first-year Chinese at UO for 4 terms, which includes CHN 101 to 103 as well as the newly established accelerated class CHN 105. She teaches the Wednesday and Friday drill sessions for the various Chinese classes. Based on the principle of building a communicative language classroom, her lesson plans usually contain a lot of activities through which the students can have more opportunities for producing the target language, negotiating meanings and receiving authentic inputs.

Second, she also works as a tutor and disciplinary mentor for the Chinese Flagship Program undergraduate students. She has tutored over 10 Flagship students either in their Chinese-related major coursework or OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview) preparation. She likes adopting the “4-3-2” method in 1-on-1 tutoring to increase each student’s fluency. Besides that, she also cautiously provides feedbacks and corrections, aiming to improve learner accuracy.

She also works for the Chinese Flagship Program as a graduate coordinator. Cooperating with the student leader team “Banzhang,” her job is to hold weekly meetings with the Flagship students. Using only Chinese, Heidi communicates with the Banzhang team and helps them arranging termly or yearly Flagship events.

Finally, in Fall 2016, Heidi was the GE of EALL 209 (East Asian Languages and Societies). It was an undergraduate level lecture taught in English which mainly introduced Chinese, Japanese and Korean societies and their related cultural backgrounds. Heidi was the grader of EALL 209, and she also taught 2 lectures in this course the contents of which were about Chinese politeness and metaphors.

Why did you decide to join the LTS program? Is there anything you look forward to doing in the program?

The reason why I applied for LTS lies in the strong theoretical and practical professional foundation that this program can provide to its students. On the one hand, I wish to systematically study the principles and theories of language acquisition and pedagogy. I am interested in reading the most cutting-edge research articles in language teaching as well as discovering any research gaps that may occur or have appeared in teaching Chinese to L1 English speakers. On the other hand, LTS is also a valuable resource that facilitates my language teaching as a GE. I have been adopting a lot of methods and approaches I have learned in the previous LTS classes in my classes where I teach Chinese. I also wish to obtain a profound understanding of the domains of teaching method, lesson planning, curriculum development, etc.