Here are a few of my recent projects and papers.

Chinese Visiting Scholars

The Bridging Cultures: US/China Program at Mount St. Mary’s College, Los Angeles, that I direct selects one visiting scholar to come to the college each year. Each scholar is a young woman from the English Department of Nanjing University who shares her experiences of living in China with students and faculty at Mount St. Mary’s College and Loyola Marymount University. Begun at Mount St. Mary’s in 2001, the visiting scholars program has been co-sponsored with the Asian and Pacific Studies Program at Loyola Marymount University since 2004.  This year’s visitor is Fan Hao who is in the second year of her PhD program.

Rural Elementary School Teaching

2009 produced the most recent round of visits to observe and record classroom lessons in two villages in Anhui Province and in An Shang Village in Shaanxi Province. My Chinese research partner, Yu Zhenyou, and I are currently analyzing the lessons to learn how rural communities are succeeding in meeting national curriculum changes and to identify what types of learning techniques dominate teaching.

Research on Preschool Literacy Development

Yu Zhenyou, my research partner at China Women's University, and I have studied effective means for literacy development in preschools in China. In a preliminary study we examined interactions of teachers and children to understand how teachers affect children's interest and engagement in reading activities. We found that the teachers focused on factual details of books whereas children learned best when they were encouraged to predict what happened next in the story, talk about what they thought, or speculate about characters and events.
Emergent Literacy (pdf)    Child Book Activities (pdf)

Children's Looking Habits in China and the United States

For seven years, with the help of Chinese colleagues, I have studied how two- and three-year-old children in China and the United States look at things. Sound strange? It turns out gestures and non-talking behavior are powerful even though we are not aware of it. My findings suggest that young English-speaking children in the United States are more physically active and stay visually focused on something in shorter increments than Chinese children. Chinese speakers in China appear to be more focused because they hold still for longer periods of time. US parents watching videos of Chinese toddlers have described them as 'calm' and 'still', while Chinese parents viewing US children have described them as 'active' and sometimes engaging in 'dangerous' activity.
Overview of this work (pdf file)     Additional papers can be found here.

An Shang Village

Since 2004 I have spent many weeks in An Shang Village, first with a Global Volunteers program-once during the corn harvest; then two years later as the winter wheat and rapeseed were maturing. Since then I have interviewed and observed teachers and spent days learning about the village from the former village leader. Two articles are on the village website. A book about the village leader is in preparation.
My Lessons from An Shang Village 2005 and Changes in An Shang Village 2007

How Chinese Children Learn to Write and Remember Characters

An earlier study (2003) that we still find important interviewed 30 primary grade children in China to discover how they learn and remember characters in their early years of literacy development. A paper reporting the results also includes a description of how Chinese writing is taught. The children most often used the shape of characters or parts of characters to remember them, and seldom drew on the limited phonetic information found in characters.
Full Article (pdf file)

Recent China Images

A few times a year since 2004 I have written about my personal experiences in China. The most recent one is 'Opera and the Soul of China.' You can sign up for future issues and/or request back issues. They're free.
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