The Graduate School recently announced that 2 DEALL Graduate Students have been awarded the 2024-25 Graduate Associate Teaching Award (GATA). 

GATA is the premier award for celebrating excellence in teaching at the graduate level. Recipients of the GATA are nominated by faculty, staff and students through an anonymous nomination process. Each nominee is asked to provide an application packet which is reviewed holistically by the GATA selection committee to evaluate the nominee’s ability to facilitate student learning and to reflect, evaluate, and improve their own teaching. 

The recipients of the GATA are awarded a one-time $2,000 award for their accomplishments and are honored at the annual Graduate School Awards Ceremony. Both Ai-Ling and Siyuan have excelled as teachers throughout their graduate careers at DEALL. The department is grateful for their consistently good work and proud to see our graduate students assume the tradition of teaching excellence that our department strives to embody each day. 

Siyuan Dong is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Chinese pedagogy under the guidance of Professor Galal Walker. She holds two master’s degrees in educational psychology from Sun Yat-sen University and Tokyo Gakugei University. Her diverse educational background inspired her to delve into foreign language teaching and learning. Her research interests include self-regulated learning, motivation in language learning, and second language acquisition.

Beyond her research, Siyuan has gained extensive teaching experience. Since 2018, she has been a Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) instructor in Tokyo, helping international students pursue their academic goals at both undergraduate and graduate levels at universities in Japan. As a GTA at OSU, she has taught various courses, including the Individualized Instruction Chinese program (all levels), the Individualized Instruction Japanese program (beginning level), beginning and intermediate level Chinese and Japanese (classroom track), Intensive Japanese Study (SPEAC), and an undergraduate course in East Asian humanities.

Ai-Ling Lu is currently the coordinator of Level 3 Intensive Spoken Chinese, where she co-teaches with Siyuan. She has taught Level 1 Chinese I & II and Level 2 Intensive Spoken Chinese. Ai-Ling gave this statement in response to her award, "Working alongside other incredible DEALL GTAs has been a valuable experience, and I have learned so much from them. My research focuses on Chinese language pedagogy, and I appreciate the dynamic interplay between research and teaching, where each continuously informs and enhances the other. I strive to develop and implement pedagogical approaches that equip Chinese language learners with diverse interactional repertoires, enabling them to navigate cross-cultural interactions more effectively."