Liling Huang

Liling Huang is the Chinese Language Program Coordinator for the Chinese Program at Boston University (BU) and serves as Chair of ACTFL’s Teaching Language and Culture Special Interest Group. She has taught Chinese language courses at all levels and developed multiple content-based courses, online courses, and a graduate-level pedagogy course. Prior to joining BU, she taught at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.

Her initiatives have been recognized nationally: the ACTFL Global Engagement Award for intercultural virtual exchange and linguistic landscape fieldwork projects; the ACTFL Online Teaching Award and Blackboard Exemplary Course Award for her pioneered work in online and blended curricula; the CLTA–Cengage Innovative Excellence in Teaching Award for teaching Chinese pragmatics; and the ACTFL Research Priorities Grant for her dissertation on “Novice Mandarin Learners’ Intercultural Transformative Learning through Critical Virtual Exchange–A Multimodal Translanguaging Design”. At BU, she has also received competitive university-wide grants such as the Bridge Builder Fellowship (2022–2024), Blended Learning Challenge Fellowship (2018), Course Redesign Grant (2017), and multiple Online Course Development Grants (2017, 2019).

Her research and teaching expertise includes intercultural communication education, critical virtual exchange, technology-enhanced language learning, online pedagogy, and curriculum design. She has presented at international conferences (AAAL, ACTFL, CLTA, CALICO), conducted nationwide teacher-training workshops, and published in venues such as Routledge and Foreign Language Annals. Huang holds full ACTFL certification to conduct Mandarin Oral Proficiency Interviews. She also extends her impact beyond the classroom through her educational YouTube channel, Happy Chinese with Liling, and her self-paced learning website on Chinese pragmatics, Practical Chinese.

Currently, she is working on advancing intercultural citizenship via service learning, cultivating global citizenship by integrating UN’s SDGs into world language curriculum, and decolonizing Chinese curriculum for heritage and nonheritage learners by incorporating curricular representations of diverse linguistic and regional cultures.