This is who I am~

Hi everyone!
This is my husband & me in the photo. We are both first-year doctoral students here at Purdue. I'm in the Language & Literacy program in the Dept. of C & I, and he is in the Dept. of BME. We got married in July, 2006 and came to the States in early August. We've known each other for almost 10 years since college. Before we came to the U.S., I used to be a middle school English teacher for 4 years and had a M.A. in TESL(Teaching English as a Second Language) and my husband worked as an engineer after his M.A. in Mechanical Engineering. It's not easy to leave our families, friends, jobs behind in Taiwan to pursue further studies here, but we believe that the study and life experience here in America will be a very unforgettable memory for us.

My first encounter with YA novels was dated back to 7th grade, 2 years after I started to learn English. The reading of those novels peppered the learning of English which was mostly based on school/government-assigned textbooks. However, it wasn't until I became a middle school teacher and worked with a group of teachers in the Advanced English (AE) program that I had a chance to include YA books into the English-teaching curriculum. During the two years that I worked with AE students, we went through the assigned The lion, the witch, the wardrobe; There's a boy in the girl's bathroom; Dear Mr. Henshaw; Holes; The Trumpet of the Swan; Walk Two Moons; and some other Beverley Clearly collections. Although the age-level of my students were 7th & 8th graders, considering their English proficiency, many of the books we chose were around 4-5th grade reading levels for native-speaking children. However, introducing YA novels to students did stimulate the aspiration to learn English in many of them.

Therefore, since I really enjoy teaching English, I am here to explore more that I can do with YA literature. And I'm really glad to find out many of you are current school teachers or with years of teaching experiences in the past! I believe the first-hand information from you will fulfill my curiosity in how American teachers include YA lit in the curriculum design.

Nice to meet you all~!