1. Qinglan Wang
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Teaching Philosophy
As a multilingual writer, I aim to create a First-Year Composition course that is
accessible, versatile in learning styles, and presents interactive subjects. I learned English as my
third language, after Chinese and German, having moved to Honolulu, Hawaii at the age of
seven. A third-culture child, I experienced the initial cultural shock and adjustment international
students undergo upon arriving in the United States and in a university setting. My personal
experiences, in learning English and adjusting to cultural shifts in the United States, have
motivated me to become a learner and a teacher.
English, like any foreign language, is a challenge. The particular mechanics of reading,
writing, and understanding English is extremely difficult to a non-native speaker. One of the
greatest challenges I have faced (and I have watched my multilingual students struggle with) is
the desire to hide behind the non-native English speaker label. Throughout the course of our
academic years, my multilingual students and I have been constantly told that we will never be
as good enough as native English speakers and writers. Our writing and speech will always show
our language inheritance. We should always preface to everyone around us that English is not
our first language. As if these statements excuse our inability to be good writers and students.
These statements indulge in already growing list of insecurities, which only further demoralize
any learner. Excuses become a crutch, one that is simply untrue and dangerous to the process of
learning. I have always refused to allow these statements to hold me back from personal self-
improvement. Likewise, I also refuse to allow my students to hide behind these statements or
accept the label of being ESL as a sort of lesser student. Everyone comes to my classroom for a
reason: we are all here to learn.

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This desire to hide behind challenges extends to students from all different background
and ages. For the past five years, I have worked with a range of students. From elementary
students to undergraduates and adults, I have watched them battle with the English language.
When they struggle in their writing and reading comprehension, I concede that yes writing is
challenging and yes, they must be extra sensitive about their grammatical errors and fluency.
Yes, they will require an extensive amount of time to read a text and process the ideas. I remind
them to enjoy the process of confronting these challenges, explaining that this is the process of
learning.
Sometimes my non-native English students complain that their peers, who are native
speakers, have a greater advantage in accessing the material and tasks assigned to them. I
question their certainty behind this belief. These tasks in reading and writing are issues
confronted by all students, native and nonnative speakers. I include myself in this group. They
should learn to use their multilingual status as an advantage. They are in the position to further
develop a set of higher level of critical thinking skills. This is what differentiates them as
creative thinkers and problem solvers. Their personal investment of extra time and effort is also
an advantage. They have already understood and accepted the fact that these reading and writing
skills require much more time than first recognized. They are halfway there in the learning
process.
Part of learning is to accept that failure is a huge part of the process. Like the acquisition
of any skill, learning a language requires consistent practice, an investment of effort and time.
Not all attempts will lead to success. The first attempt, the first rough draft, the first step in
beginning a project is not an immediate success. Rather, it is a lesson in improvement. I
emphasize that every challenge is worth encountering, even if it is simply to experience failure.

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While good writing appears to be simple, the writing process is arduous and challenging.
It involves investing in time to brainstorm and outline an idea for a paper before beginning on a
rough draft. I explain this process also includes editing and revising a paper for the fifth time
around. Another step could be rereading a fifty-pages chapter a second or a third time and
looking up new words in the dictionary each time, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the
material. The time and effort it takes to acquire a language fluently is a lifetime struggle. I
encourage my students to value their personal persistence in learning the material at a deeper
level, simply because they personally want to.
Since failure is readily present in the learning process, the brain must be flexible and
versatile enough to develop a variety of methods to solve one problem. When it comes to
learning a language, all methods and approaches must be applied before a fundamental skill is
acquired. This comes from examining one challenge from different perspectives and applying
different solutions. Many of my writing assignments are built around examining the task from
many perspectives and then reflecting on which strategies worked best. I shape my curriculum to
engage in all three learning styles (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic), which then provides
students different venues to access the material at hand and challenges to consider another form
of thinking.
Students should be challenged to try out all types of learning styles in order to recognize
what suits them best. Every student is unique and every student encounters the same challenges.
I shape my curriculum around development the fundamental reading and writing skills as well as
take into consideration the unique skills and personality of each group of students. In my English
101 Composition course, I have a section on public speaking, where students are asked to work
together on a formal presentation of an argument. Students are asked to research, present, and

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debate one another on a particular set topic. In my Literature 201 course, students create a
reading presentation the text, ask larger discussion questions to the class, and create an in-class
activity based on the reading to engage the class. In both courses, I have a portion of in-class
writing assignments, ask them to physically note-take my lectures in notebooks, and have them
read aloud in class. Whether it is reading a novel or reading an article, I teach active reading: to
physically underline the larger ideas in the text, to question these ideas further besides accepting
them, and to explain to me their responses to the material. Information is just collection of data
with little relevance until it is processed, synthesized, and given meaning to it. Reading and
writing is the selective synthesizing of information, the meaning making and the overall
presentation of information.
A large part of my teaching philosophy is to ask students to meet me in the engagement
of material and lesson at hand. Students must want to engage with the material and tasks at hand
before intrinsically developing them on their own. My classroom is a mutual exchange of ideas
and effort, a place of convergence where I expect them to be as engaged with the material as I
am. I encourage my students to discover personal ways of synthesizing the information, to find
different forms of engagement with the material, instead of accepting information at face value.
They should be comfortable enough to have diverging opinions, as my goal is to create an
environment for intellectual discourse. Students should not shy away from disagreement or
unpopular ideas. I present them a range of texts and written subjects that engage the world
around us, outside of the classroom, showing them the importance of being an active participant
or an informed observer.
One of the greatest rewards in working with multilingual students is seeing them grow
confident in their writing and language abilities. My past students still email and visit me.

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Bright-eyed, they recount their latest learning venture or to ask me for recommendations to
internships and personal readings. My door is always open to them, as I love watching them
strive for greater challenges outside of my classroom.