Mu Ling

Senior Lector II, East Asian Languages and Literatures

Mu Ling, BA, M.A. Shandong University, Ph.D. Cornell University, faculty member at Yale since 1995: you have devoted your life and career to the teaching of the Chinese language to English speakers, always pioneering increasingly innovative ways to make this challenging task more effective and more productive. The fact that you have at one time or another taught every course in Chinese language during the Yale semester and during the summer is laudable enough. But the contribution you have made by bringing innovative techniques to this task are what have gained you institutional and national attention and gratitude.

In your role as the director of the Chinese language program from 2000-2007, you helped to reform the curriculum and restructure the entire Chinese language program. This reform helped draw in more students, and laid the foundation for its long-term development. You were the first to use PowerPoint in a Chinese classroom for daily teaching. In 2003 you were awarded the McCredie Prize for creative use of technology for language instruction. And following this you have never ceased finding and adapting new ways to make your teaching more potent and valuable. You developed flash cards and slide shows. You promoted Chinese picture dictionaries, Chinese newspapers, and films. You developed short lectures on Chinese characters. You incorporated all kinds of computer technologies into your classroom teaching. You used all of these strategies at Yale and demonstrated them at national conferences, becoming a recognized expert on how to teach the Chinese language well, and setting a model for your colleagues in other Chinese programs around the country.

A glance at presentations you made at national conferences demonstrates how you are always investigating and developing new approaches to pedagogy: Titles such as “Embedding Culture in Chinese Teaching”; “Making a Vocabulary List Quickly, A Step by Step Tutorial”; Streamlining Chinese Placement process with an internet Tool”; “Quick Ways to Create a Picture Movie for Class and Web use” –all of these and many more presentations and published articles show your restless insistence on creating teaching tools to improve teaching.

Around the University you have served on the faculty advisory committee for the Yale-PKU program and on the executive committee for the Light Fellowship. But your greatest contribution has been the way you have helped your students gain fluency in a language that does not come naturally to them and so have taken a role in forging better relationships between the people of two countries. For all of this Yale offers you, Mu Laoshi, a warm and grateful: Xie Xie Nin!

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans