Yanwen Wu

Lecturer in Chinese

Office: 602 Uris Hall
Office Hours: MW 1-2:30 PM
Phone: 212-854-0660
Email: yw4033@columbia.edu

Educational Background

Ph.D.: Chinese Linguistics, University of Wisconsin- Madison
M.A.: Chinese Linguistics, University of Wisconsin- Madison
B.A.: Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, Nanjing University

Classes Taught

CHNS UN2201 Second Year Chinese N I
CHNS UN3003 Third Year Chinese I

Research Interests

Chinese Poetic Tonal Prosody
Second Language Acquisition
Phonology

Yanwen Wu joined the Columbia faculty in the Fall of 2022. Her dissertation, entitled “Tonal Prosody in Recent-style Verse of the Early Tang: From a Statistical Perspective”, studies the poetic metric patterns of Middle Chinese and how Chinese poetic prosody was developed throughout history. Her dissertation was awarded the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship supported by Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and was invited to present at several national and international conferences. She also published and co-authored several articles in the field of second language acquisition and Chinese dialectology. Before joining EALAC, Yanwen taught Chinese language classes at all levels at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to teaching, she also had a lot of experience in coordinating and supervising different Chinese language and culture programs at UW-Madison.

Kaidi Chen

Lecturer in Chinese

Office: 605(B) Uris Hall
Office Hours: MTW 5:10 -6:10 PM
Phone: (212) 854-5038
Email: kc3640@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD ABD: Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies, Graduate Certificate in Cognitive Science, University of Connecticut
MA: Chinese Linguistics, University of Macau
BA: Liberal Arts (Longji/Cuiyin honors program), concentration in Chinese Language and Literature, Lanzhou University

Classes Taught

CHNS UN1101 First Year Chinese I
CHNS UN2201 Second Year Chinese N I

Research Interests

Psycholinguistics (speech perception)
Sociolinguistics (sociophonetics)
Second language acquisition (L2 speech)
Language pedagogy (communicative approach and intercultural competence)
Open science and reproducible research practices
Data analysis and visualization

Kaidi Chen joined the Columbia EALAC department as a full-time faculty member in the Fall of 2022. He is a mixed-methods linguist and researcher working at the intersection of speech science, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, bilingualism and language pedagogy. His recent research examines the interplay between bottom-up acoustic cues and top-down semantic cues, as well as individual differences in spoken word recognition in both native and non-native speech. He mainly employs behavior experiments, survey methodology and computational modeling and simulation for studies on human speech. He utilizes R programming to visualize data and perform both descriptive and inferential statistical analysis (t-test, ANOVA, correlation, regression, mixed-effects models, etc.). The languages of investigation are primarily Chinese and English.

He has been awarded several competitive national grants/awards, including the Dissertation Grant (ranked among the very best) from Language Learning, a prestigious top journal in linguistics; the Jiede Empirical Research Grant from the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) USA; the Graduate Research Support Grant from the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Association (NFMLTA) and the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL); and a collaborative Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (DHAG) from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). He has published (including editing) over 10 book chapters, peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings, and has presented widely at regional, national and international conferences across various strands in the field.

He is also an experienced language educator who is dedicated to real-world pedagogical innovations. As a core collaborator of the NEH grant project titled “An Engaging Digital Curriculum for Intermediate Chinese Language and Culture”, he primarily focused on the implementation of intercultural communicative competence and intercultural citizenship in the Chinese language classroom. He is one of the contributors to the book Teaching Beginning Chinese Grammar: Communicative Strategies and Activities, which serves as a teacher’s handbook accompanying the most widely used Chinese language textbook Integrated Chinese in the US. He has extensive experience in teaching all levels of Chinese language/culture, as well as domain-specific language/culture courses (e.g., Contemporary Chinese Film and Business Chinese). Prior to Columbia, he taught as instructor/lecturer at Allegheny College, Trinity College, and Middlebury Summer Language School.

Tao Peng

Lecturer in Chinese

Office: 604 Uris Hall
Office Hours: MW 1:00-2:30
Phone: (212) 854-3604
Email: tp2728@columbia.edu

Educational Background

Ph.D.: Comparative Literature, University of California, Riverside.
Ed.M.: Curriculum and Methodology of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, Beijing Language and Culture University
B.A.: Chinese Language and Literature, Hunan Normal University

Classes Taught

CHNS UN1101 First Year Chinese I
CHNS UN1102 First Year Chinese II
CHNS UN2201 Second Year Chinese N I
CHNS UN2202 Second Year Chinese N II
CHNS GU4017 Fourth Year Chinese Advanced I

Research Interests

Tao Peng earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Riverside. His primary research focuses on modern Chinese fiction with a special interest in the interactions between language and literature. His dissertation, “The Emergence of the Modern Chinese Narrator: Studies of Lu Xun, Shi Zhecun, Sun Li, and Wang Zengqi,” is an interdisciplinary project of literary criticism, narratology, and linguistics. Tao Peng joined the Columbia faculty as a Lecturer of Chinese in the Fall of 2021. Before joining the Columbia faculty, Tao Peng taught Chinese language classes at Princeton University, Middlebury Chinese School, and several language programs in China. He also taught and coordinated various levels of Chinese courses at the Princeton in Beijing Summer Program.