I majored in English Language and Literature while an undergraduate at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA). I achieved an overall GPA of 3.7. Prompted by my interest in linguistics, I entered the Masters program in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at BUAA in the fall of 1998. My academic performance in graduate studies was even better, ranking first in my class with an overall GPA of 3.89. In acknowledgement of my success, I was awarded the Excellent Graduate Student Scholarship of BUAA in 1999 and the International Engineering Technology (IET) Scholarship in 2000.

Though I am proud of my academic achievements, my greatest rewards came from my working experience. I enjoy teaching very much because I think it is a process of communication between teacher and students and one can learn a lot in this process. From 1998 to the present, I have been teaching part time at BUAA and other universities. Through the increasing interaction between the teacher and the students, I found through my experience, could improve students' learning efficiency dramatically. During my teaching I often encouraged discussion and teamwork in classroom, as I believe working in groups could help students learn to cooperate and learn from each other. I taught them studying skills and methods rather than pure language theory, and I also tried to reform the traditional language teaching style by using techniques like newspaper reading and video playing in the classroom. The students showed great interest in learning English through the media and exhibited enthusiasm in classroom participation, though some were weak in understanding materials that were specifically related to the foreign culture. I addressed this issue in my paper Cultural Barrier in SLA and Its Implication for EFL Teaching at the 4th International Conference on Foreign Language Teaching, held in Beijing in October 1999. In this paper I suggested that the simultaneous teaching of foreign language and culture would produce optimum results.

Culture not only has impact on language learning, but also affects communication among people from different cultural backgrounds. I have worked as an English interpreter for several international conferences and expositions held in Beijing (see resume) since I was a sophomore. This gave me good opportunities to meet people from different parts of the world. While accomplishing my task successfully every time, I did encounter occasions when communication had to break down due to inappropriate use of communicative skills or lack of cultural awareness from either the part of interlocutors or sometimes me -- the interpreter. Since different cultures often hold different philosophies about norms of behavior, this difference may result in barriers in cross-cultural communication. Then how can cross-cultural interpersonal communication be most effective? Are there any ways to overcome communication barriers other than those that are caused by language obstacles?

Currently I am doing my Masters thesis on interpersonal addressing behavior in China. While language is undergoing constant change with the development of history, the use of address terms in China has also changed as the social and economical situation altered. Basically what I am trying to do is to freed out how the cultural and political changes that have taken place in China have affected the use of address terms among people, and how variables like age, sex, occupation and familiarity may influence people's selection of certain address terms. Moreover, a speaker's choice of a particular address form in a conversation often shows the relationship between the speaker and the hearer and can sometimes reflect the speaker's motivation and feeling in a certain context. In this sense, address behavior is more important as a pragmatic and sociolinguistic phenomenon than as merely an instance of linguistic performance.

I decided to further my study in the area of interpersonal communication at Purdue University because its communication graduate program is an American leader in this field. Furthermore, I found the interdisciplinary nature of the department and the size and diversity of the faculty and student body very appealing. Upon completion of the advanced training in your program, I hope to become a professional researcher in interpersonal communication in my homeland.