BYU Humanities College Meeting 2014
INTRODUCTIONS ASIAN AND NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES RACHEL LIU, assistant professor of Chinese, comes to us with eight years of experience teaching Chinese. She received her BA and PhD from Sun Yat-sen University in China, with emphases on Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, Linguistics, and Applied Linguistics. She is not new to BYU, having taught as a visiting professor in the Chinese Flagship Center from 2010-2013, prior to which she also served as an instructor in the “Princeton in Beijing” intensive language program. She and her husband Ryan have a son, Mason. In her spare time she likes to take pictures and cook. STEVE MOODY, assistant professor of Japanese language, received BAs in economics and Japanese from Brigham Young University in 2006, an MA in economics from The Ohio State University in 2009 and an MA in Japanese from the University of Hawaii in 2012. He will finish his PhD in Japanese, also at the University of Hawaii, in December this year. Prior to embarking on his doctoral studies in language he worked as a financial analyst, but eventually found a stronger interest in sociolinguistics. His current research centers around a sociolinguistic analysis of American workers in Japan. Steve is a native of American Fork, Utah, and comes to Provo with his wife, Melissa, a Utah State graduate and Utah native, and their daughter Katelynn. They are expecting another daughter at the end of the year. XINYI WU, visiting instructor of Chinese, Dr. Wu was born and raised in Nanjing, China. She received her PhD in Comparative and International Development Education from University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Her research interests include cultural foundations of education, educational policy and practice, critical discourse analysis, curriculum development, and language assessment. She is particularly interested in the issues of ethnicity, ethnic identity, educational inequality, cultural reproduction and production in education, and academic engagement and performance. Prior to joining the BYU Flagship team, she has taught Chinese in the Confucius Institute at Minnesota, Defense Language Institute at Monterey, and in our department. She also worked as a language proficiency test assessor as well as a Chinese intensive course developer and immersion specialist. She is happy to return to BYU and prepare Flagship students to be culturally and linguistically competent before their pursuit of China-related careers in the future. She enjoys reading, traveling, hiking, biking, and cooking.
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