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Dr. Hua Lin has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English language and literature, a Master's degree in English-as-a-second-language education and a Doctoral degree in linguistics. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria, Canada, and has been a full-time faculty member here since 1993.

As a professor, Dr. Lin is dedicated to her teaching. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in second language phonetics and phonology, second language acquisition, Chinese linguistics, phonology, contrastive linguistics, and the Chinese language. Dr. Lin is dedicated to the supervision of her honor’s, Master’s and doctoral students. She has collaborated with a number of these students on research projects.

Dr. Lin's major research interests focus on second language acquisition of the phonetic and phonological systems. In layman’s terms, this area explores how a person acquires the pronunciation of a second language. Her current research projects include (1) a book on the role the mother-tongue plays in learning the phonetics and phonology of Chinese and English as a second language by, respectively, English and Chinese speakers; (2) the rhythm of language and how it is acquired when the language is learned as a second language; (3) how tones are perceived/acquired by speakers of tone and non-tone languages; and (4) how Mandarin speakers acquire English consonants such as /l/ in post-vocalic positions.

Dr. Lin has also worked extensively on Chinese linguistics. She has explored the phonemic systems, tonal systems, syllables, stress patterns, words, word structure and syntactic structure of Chinese dialects, especially Mandarin, the official dialect/language of China, Taiwan and Singapore. She has conducted historical studies of the language, and has examined a popular type of Chinese versification called shunkouliur. She has done research on teaching and learning Chinese as a second language, the teaching and learning of English by native Chinese speakers, and bilingual education in China. In the area of Chinese linguistics, she has published three books, including A Grammar of Mandarin Chinese, which is a linguistic account of the sound, word and sentence structures of Mandarin Chinese. This book which has been used as a textbook in a number of Chinese Linguistics courses in universities such as University of Victoria (Linguistics, and Pacific and Asian Studies); University of North Carolina (Asian Studies), and University of Alberta (Asian Studies) also includes a chapter on the history and dialects of the Chinese language. Other contributions she has made to Chinese linguistics studies include the organization of the Ninth North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (1997), and services on the Executive Committee of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics. See below for a list of her publications, and click here for more information on her publications.

Dr. Lin has served on a number of departmental and university committees. In addition to formerly chairing the Graduate Studies Committee, she has chaired the Curriculum Committee and the Equity Committee, and served on the Applied Linguistics Committee and Salary Committee of the department. For the last three years, she has been a Senator in the University Senate and served on its Committee on Academic Standards and Committee on Credit and Transfer. For 10 years she was a member of the Executive Committee of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives and a member of the China Advisory Executive Committee.

Dr. Lin is devoted to the internationalization of the University of Victoria. Her courses and research take her and her students beyond our national boundaries to other parts of the world. She has traveled extensively in Asia for research and international liaison purposes. For six years she had an on-going research project at the New Century School, Guangdong, China. In 2001, she developed a bilingual education program for the NCS's Middle and High Schools, and monitored the program in the following years to determine, among other factors, if teaching English through content works better than teaching English in the traditional way.

Dr. Lin has been invited to give speeches at various universities in Asia, including National University of Singapore; Rangsit University, Bangkok, Thailand; National Union University, Taiwan; Shandong and Lanzhou Universities, China. In addition, Dr. Lin has traveled to Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Mexico and other parts of North America for conferences, research and international liaison. On a recent trip to Mexico, Dr. Lin visited the CUC campus of the University of Guadalajara on university liaison business. During the one-week Mexico visit, she fell in love with the Spanish language and came back having picked up 59 Spanish words. Her favorite expression is mi casa, su casa. She looks forward to using that phrase to her Mexican colleagues and friends when they come to visit Victoria. She has now started on a research to explore the rhythmic patterns of English spoken by Spanish speakers.

In her spare time to keep herself fit for hectic academic work, Dr. Lin dances. She has a passion for the art of dancing and has been a member of the Victoria Ballroom Dance Society since 1999. She has had her own Chinese folk dance group since the early 1990s, and volunteers her time teaching Chinese folk dance at local high schools.

Click here for a photo gallery of her life in Canada and beyond.

Recent Work - click to view/hide