Topic: Study abroad in China: A case study of ethnic minority college students.
Biography:
Hang Du, a native of Beijing, has been calling the Green Mountain State home for fourteen years now. She holds an MA in Linguistics, and a Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition from the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) at the University of Arizona. Prior to joining the Chinese Department in 2004, she had taught first-year Chinese in the Middlebury Chinese School for two summers in 2001 and 2002. Her language teaching includes over 15 years’ experience teaching beginning Chinese, second-year Chinese, and senior seminars about contemporary Chinese culture and society for students who have returned from study abroad in China, using all authentic material written/produced by and for the Chinese people. In addition, Hang Du has had extensive training in giving the Chinese Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) following guidelines created by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). She has also designed standardized test items for American Councils for International Education to assess students’ Chinese proficiency in the Flagship programs in China.
Hang Du’s main research area is the acquisition of Chinese as a second language. Her major publications include the book The Acquisition of the Chinese ba-construction (2006), and two recent articles: “The Development of Chinese Fluency during Study Abroad in China,” published in the Modern Language Journal (2013), and “American College Students Studying Abroad in China: Language, Identity and Self-presentation,” published in Foreign Language Annals (2015). She has served as a peer reviewer for several major journals in her field, such as the Modern Language Journal, Applied Linguistics, Foreign Language Annals, and Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association.
Hang Du has been involved in the Linguistics initiative at Middlebury, which resulted in a successful Linguistics Minor in 2010, since its inception. She taught a linguistics first-year seminar about how children acquire their first language in 2009 and 2015. Another linguistics class that she teaches regularly is “Chinese/Linguistics 270 (Chinese Sociolinguistics).” She is currently the Director of the Linguistics Program, in addition to chairing the Chinese Department.