In tandem with my research interests, my teaching interests fall into three major areas: 1) College Composition and Second Language Writing; 2) Theory and Methods of TESOL, and Second Language Acquisition; 3) ESL Literacy and Chinese as a Foreign Language. I taught TESOL, linguistics and composition courses at Ohio State University and Southern Illinois University Carbondale. I also had experience teaching Mandarin Chinese as a second/foreign language in Guangzhou, China. Over the past decade, I worked with diverse student populations – middle school students, undergraduates and graduates, English Language Learners (ELL)/ English as Second Language learners (ESL)/ English as Foreign Language learners (EFL) – in China and the United States in various roles (as lecturer, Graduate Teaching Assistant, tutor).
Currently, I teach Writing and Rhetoric courses in the Department of English at Florida International University. At Ohio State University, I taught college composition courses to undergraduate students with diverse cultural, linguistic and disciplinary backgrounds in the ESL Composition Program from 2012-2014. I introduced my multilingual students to English academic writing and helped them develop their literacy skills to meet the challenges of writing in their academic and social lives. I worked with them on rhetorical, stylistic and language issues throughout the composing process; and encouraged them to use writing to learn, to think critically, and to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences.
In my composition classes, I implemented student-centered activities, such as free writing, peer review, writing portfolio, literacy autobiography and reflection. In addition to engaging students in classroom learning, I incorporated educational technologies into my teaching, using digital storytelling and corpus linguistic tools (e.g., COCA and Netspeak) to facilitate student learning. I created video lectures on various topics of academic reading and writing.
ESL Poster Forum. Copyright 2014 – Ruilan Zhao. All Rights Reserved.
I design and organize my coursework in ways that encourage my students to apply classroom knowledge to real learning contexts. My goal is to help them cope with the challenges of reading and writing in their academic, professional and personal lives, share with classmates and colleagues the new theoretical and practical knowledge, and use those knowledge to solve real life problems. To the left, you see my student presented her research in poster format in the EDUTL 1902 Poster Forum. In this event, students interacted with a variety of audiences to showcase their individual research. In 2014, I received Outstanding Writing Instruction Award Honorable Mention from Center for the Study and Learning of Writing (CSTW) at Ohio State University.
In 2008-2010, I taught TESOL graduate courses, such as Pedagogical Grammar for ESOL Teachers in the Department of Linguistics at Southern Illinois University. I also worked as an ELL teacher in Unity Point, a suburban K-8 public school at Carbondale Illinois, where I tutored 8th graders language arts and content subjects, such as history, social science and mathematics.