Dr. Walter Cheng Stanford University & John Hopkins University 美國史丹佛大學&約翰霍普金斯大學

      I am honored to write this letter of reference for Emily Chang, who was my instructor in Mandarin Chinese at the National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) in Taipei, Taiwan during the summer of 2013.

      I was born and raised in the United States as a child of immigrants from Taiwan. I grew up speaking Mandarin in the household and developed some level of fluency from the daily use of Chinese with my family, but had never pursued any formal education in the language. As a result of this, despite my ability to carry on basic conversations in Mandarin, I became increasingly aware that my Mandarin was constrained by a limited vocabulary and a collection of fundamental grammatical flaws. And, as a physician working in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has a large Chinese population, I realized that I needed to use Chinese on nearly a daily basis. I found that my limited language skills were a real detriment.

     I had the opportunity to take an extended trip to Taiwan in 2013 and enrolled in NTNU’s 3-week summer express program.  Emily Chang was my teacher and she certainly had an eclectic class, with 6 Japanese students and 2 American students. While we were all placed with a similar level of overall ability, the relative strengths of our abilities were, in reality, quite disparate – some were better at oral communication, while others were stronger at reading and writing.

     Ms. Chang was able to manage this class dynamic with great skill, making sure to find exercises that would challenge all members of the class, as well as providing focused attention to each student on their specific needs. Our three-hour daily sessions seemed to fly by, as she always kept us engaged. She has a great ability to keep students focused, without being rigid, and injecting humor into her lessons.

     Of course, in three weeks, I wasn’t expecting to become miraculously fully fluent in the language. However, I did find that Ms. Chang helped me to correct up many of the bad habits I had picked up in Mandarin through years of informal vernacular learning. As a result, I feel that my foundation in Mandarin is far stronger, and that has allowed me to advance further in my Mandarin studies at a much faster pace than was previously possible.

     I believe that Emily Chang would be an incredible asset to your institution and no doubt, your students will find her to be intelligent, engaging and motivating. I can’t recommend her highly enough.