Taiwan-born teacher wins NY Times award

Los Angeles, March 4 (CNA) A Taiwan-born English teacher with the non-profit youth education organization The Door has been named as one of the honorees of the New York Times-sponsored annual ESOL Teacher of the Year Award. Yang Hsiao-wei, who has been teaching English at The Door for non-English-speaking new immigrants to the United States for six years, is the first NY Times award winner of Chinese descent. Now in its fourth year, the annual award was created to recognize and honor English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers who provide instruction to adult students in the greater New York City area. The NY Times is scheduled to formally announce the winner of the 2010 ESOL Teacher of the Year Award and other honorees later this month. Yang said she was delighted to learn of her selection as one of the recipients of the coveted award. "I'm happy that my efforts have received recognition, " Yang said in an interview with the Central News Agency. Recalling her years at the private Jinou Vocational High School of Commerce in Taipei, Yang said she developed great interest in English and spent almost all her nights at a cram school studying. Yang said she developed many "magic shortcuts" to memorize vocabulary quickly, such as using diagrams to show relations between words or phrases. Such schematic drawings later become her talisman in her English teaching career. Further study in England helped her expand her horizons of education, Yang said. While in England, she became familiar with Waldorf Education, apedagogy based upon the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. Yang said the concept and approach of Waldorf Education complies with her learning attitude and teaching style, with emphasis given to the role of immagination. She refined and magnified the Waldorf Education ideals after becoming a faculty member of The Door, where she faces adult students from diverse language and family backgrounds, of different ages and with different reasons for emigrating to the United States. As many new immigrants take up their first jobs in restaurants, Yang said she uses food ingredients, tableware and kitchenware as her starting teaching materials. By so doing, Yang said her students can learn the vocabulary theymost need, and as those words are used in their daily work, they canunderstand and memorize them more easily. Yang said she also asks students to provide unique recipes fromtheir homelands and then cooks the dishes in the classroom. In theprocess, she introduces ingredients and cooking methods in English tobring life to the vocabulary. Unlike students in compulsory or orthodox education, Yang saidadult immigrant students bring with them professional skills andknowledge to the United States and have their own visions andperspectives of their futures. Therefore, she said, she needs toemphasize vocabulary and knowledge in certain special fields whenarranging her teaching texts and materials. Words and knowledge needed by tour guides, as well as computer terminology, are also often the basis of her teaching materials. The rewards, she said, can be exemplified by her delight when seeing one of her students, who worked in a Japanese sushi eatery, issuing instructions in English. "I took great pleasure and comfort when I saw my student direct her apprentices in English, " Yang recalled. (By Leaf Jiang and Sofia Wu)ENDITEM/J

Taiwan-born teacher wins NY Times award Los Angeles, March 4 (CNA) A Taiwan-born English teacher with the non-profit youth education organization The Door has been named as one of the honorees of the New York Times-sponsored annual ESOL Teacher of the Year Award.