My research is focused on Mandarin Chinese phonetics, grammar, and pedagogy. I am particularly interested in exploring ways to remove my students' American accent. In the process of making contrastive analysis, I have discovered techniques to help myself and my fellow Chinese friends and colleagues to reduce our Chinese accent.
My most recent interest centers around analyses of vocabulary and effective approaches to teach it. I have been sharing my research findings on this complex subject in conferences and have joined online interest groups to further explore this topic.
I have also been involved in study abroad programs for American college students located in China and Taiwan.
I have very strong interest in researching effective approaches in teaching and fine-tuning American college students' pronunciation. Being inadequately nicknamed "the tone police" by students, I devote a good deal of time on finding more effective ways to help students break away from the influence from their native language of English. I am also interested in finding ways to better introduce the nuances between phonemes in Mandarin Chinese and American English.
Chinese grammar is another area that I am fond of exploring. I like studying grammatical features that present the most challenges to both the students and the instructors, e.g. Chinese adverbs, all complements, aspect words "le," "zhe," and "guo."
