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Allison Lai
Chinese Instructor
"When I continued Chinese in college, I was fortunate to have the same teacher, Ms. Allison Lai for all 4 years. Understanding Mandarin today is not just a unique skill, but gives one a competitive advantage to understanding an entire civilization that is still being discovered by foreigners, in particular, Westerners.
The past year I spent researching, writing, and translating a paper in conjunction with Professor Lai. Her patience, thoughtfulness, and skill at understanding my language process aided my overall experience as I delved deeper into language training, conducting interviews with native speakers and managing ambiguity of translations."
"I took several excellent college level Chinese classes taught by Professor Lai. She showed great creativity and energy in her teaching of a difficult subject. Rather than have us work only on rote memorization and repetition, she used role-playing exercises that put us in real-life circumstances where we would need to use the words and sentences we had learned. She was quick-witted and funny, and always available to meet with students. She always used the latest technology in creative and entertaining ways."
"Participation was essential and she got the whole class involved daily".
"Ms. Lai creates a classroom environment where students are not afraid to speak and ask questions. In Ms. Lai’s class, we learn new words and sentence patterns, but spend the bulk of our time actually applying these new materials to real life situations and conversations. Ms. Lai is very personable and is able to balance friendship with and authority over her students. Students respect her skills as an instructor, knowing that she cares about our individual and collective progress in Chinese. She is very sensitive to the goals and abilities of her students and tailors her lessons specifically to our needs."
"The diversity of teaching methods utilized was extremely helpful and kept the class from boring or frustrating."
"Everything was very good, and this is by far my favorite class this semester. Ms. Lai has an incredible talent for combining learning with activities. Her class was always interesting, and I believe my Chinese has improved greatly under her supervision."
"She is one of the best teachers I have had in both language classes and in general ever. She motivated us, gave us such a broad understanding of her culture and her language, and had a really infectious attitude and passion. I genuinely looked forward to this class all week. To ever lose her from the staff would be a huge detriment to the university."
"Always had a PowerPoint with numerous slides ready to help her teach the lesson. They included exercises for the whole class to participate in and videos to help us visual and listen to culture/language in use."
STUDENT FEEDBACK
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