Dr. Patricia Duff

Dr. Patricia Duff is currently Director of the Centre for Research in Chinese Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where she is Professor of Language and Literacy Education and Hanban Professor of Chinese Language and Literacy Education Research. She previously directed UBC's Centre for Intercultural Language Studies and the teacher education and graduate programs in Modern Language Education, as well as coordinating the graduate program in Teaching English as a Second Language. Although much of her research and teaching has focused on English as a second/foreign language, she has also conducted research on the teaching and learning of Mandarin and other languages. Her primary research activities concern the processes and outcomes of (second) language learning and language socialization in secondary school and university classroom contexts (foreign/second language, bilingual/immersion, mainstream content courses), as well as in workplaces and communities more generally. She is also very interested in research methods in applied linguistics.

Dr. Geoff Williams is Professor and Head of the Department of Language & Literacy Education at UBC. His research and teaching interests include educational linguistics, socio-semantic variation and early literacy development, functions of grammatical description in literacy learning, and the poetics of children's literature. He has published extensively on these topics. His current research projects are: Children Learning Orientations to Discourse Structure through Everyday Talk, Functional Grammatics for Literacy Learning, A Social Semiotic Analysis of Children’s Picture Books, Children’s Development of Knowledge about Language, and The Poetics of Children’s Picture Books.

Dr. Rob Tierney

Dr. Rob Tierney is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia and Professor in the Language and Literacy Education Department. He is also the Past-President of the Association of Canadian Deans of Education (ACDE), and current President of the Reading Hall of Fame. As an international scholar, he has authored books and articles on literacy education, educational assessment, teaching, and learning. His recent writing focuses on discussions of professionalism and meeting student needs in the current political climate of accountability, evidence-based practices, and meeting student needs. As a teacher educator, researcher, administrator, and former classroom teacher, Rob is very active in education initiatives throughout Canada, the Asia Pacific Region, and the US.

Dr. Duanduan Li

Dr. Duanduan Li is Associate Professor of Chinese Applied Linguistics, and Director of the Chinese Language Program in the Department of Asian Studies at UBC, where more than 2000 students take Chinese language and literature courses annually. Prior to coming to UBC, she was Director of the Chinese Language Program at Columbia University, New York. Her research interests and publications are related to sociolinguistics, pragmatics, language socialization, second language acquisition (both of Chinese and English), and heritage language teaching and learning. Her primary current research focus with respect to Chinese is on the languages, literacies and identities of Chinese heritage language learners. Her Chinese language textbooks include: A Primer for Heritage Chinese Learners (Columbia University Press, 2003); Chinese Vocabulary (Schaum & McGraw-Hill, 2002); and a forthcoming book, Reading into a New China (with Dr. I. Liu, Cheng and Tsui Company, Boston).

Dr. Ross King

Head, Asian Studies, UBC

Prof. Henry Yu was born in Vancouver, B.C., and grew up in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island. He received his BA in Honours History from UBC and an MA and PhD in History from Princeton University. After teaching at UCLA for a decade, Yu returned to UBC as an Associate Professor of History to help build programs focused on trans-Pacific Canada. Yu himself is both a second and fourth generation Canadian. His parents were first generation immigrants from China, joining a grandfather who had spent almost his entire life in Canada. His great-grandfather was also an early Chinese pioneer in British Columbia, part of a larger networks of migrants who left Zhongshan county in Guangdong province in South China and settled around the Pacific in places such as Australia, New Zealand, Hawai'i, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, the United States, and Canada. Prof. Yu's book, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2001) won the Norris and Carol Hundley Prize as the Most Distinguished Book of 2001, and he is currently working on a book entitled How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes: Finding Ourselves in History. Currently, he is the Director of the Initiative for Student Teaching and Research on Chinese Canadians (INSTRCC) and the Acting Principal of St. John's College at UBC, as well as a Board Member of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia (CCHSBC).

Ella Lester

Ella holds a B.A. in Chinese Language and Culture from UBC, has spent four years living, traveling, studying and working in various Chinese cities, and is now pursuing graduate studies.  She is currently in the M.A. program in Modern Languages Education and works as a Graduate Academic Assistant at the Centre for Research in Chinese Language and Literacy Education.  Ella is seeking to understand the experiences of other non-heritage learners of advanced Chinese by focusing her research on identity development in non-cognate languages, motivation in “ultimate” attainment, and additional language socialization.