
I was born into a multi-cultural family and spent the first six years of my life in Borneo, Malaysia before moving to Canada. My family background, and the travelling I was exposed to as a child, inspired me to begin my own explorations at a fairly young age. When I was 15 years old, I went by myself to take part in a language exchange program for a year in the French-speaking province of Quebec, after which time I then moved to France to complete my final year of high school and my first year of university. Since then I have explored and lived in a wide variety of countries around the world, and have taught university students from diverse backgrounds in Taiwan, Canada, the United States and Hong Kong.
My objective as a teacher of language is to inspire my students to learn how to learn, both in terms of their language skills, but also to become life-long independent learners once they leave my classroom. I hope to inspire my students with the idea that teachers will not necessarily spoon-feed them with all the knowledge they need to ‘pass the course’. Learning to communicate successfully in another language is a challenging task. I aim to facilitate my students’ learning process, not give them the false sense that there are always ‘right ‘and ‘wrong’ ways to go about doing so. This is particularly the case in learning how to communicate effectively.
Professional Interests
My professional interests include educational technology, pedagogies that supplement blended learning, game based learning, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. I am so intrigued by the possibilities surrounding educational technology that I am currently completing another higher degree, this time a Masters In Educational Technology (MET) through the University of British Columbia (remote, online mode). Though working full-time as a lecturer for the CLE and completing a Masters degree at the same time is a challenge, I am inspired the fact that I can apply almost everything I learn to my teaching, while my teaching reflects back into what I am researching. There is always more to learn!