Faculty & Staff Resources

Dr. Neal Liang came to the U.S. for his undergraduate study in Mass Communications at the University of Utah. He then worked in mass media and IT industries before being accepted into the PhD program in Linguistics at UT Arlington. His dissertation title is "The Acquisition of Chinese Classifiers by L2 Adult Learners of Chinese". He started teaching Chinese as an adjunct faculty at UTA in 2006 and earned his PhD degree in 2009. He later accepted a Lecturer position at Northern Arizona University and taught Chinese courses for one year. In 2010, he returned to UTA as a Senior Lecturer and was put in charge of the development of the Chinese program in the Modern Languages Department. During this period, the Chinese minor and major in Critical Language and International Study. In 2013, Dr. Liang became Assistant Professor and was asked to manage the growing Chinese section. He has been since teaching all levels of Chinese course, recruiting and retaining students, creating extracurricular activities, serving the communities both domestically and internationally. One of several achievements during Dr. Liang's tenure as the Chinese Section Coordinator is the creation and development of CLIS-Chinese major in 2013. In three years, the Chinese program has graduated five Chinese major students who continue on to their graduate studies or work as a language teacher in local public school. Currently, Dr. Liang devotes much of his time and resources in developing an online Chinese tutoring program where UTA students receive free supplemental tutoring from pre-service teachers in Taiwan or China. The program is well received by both UTA students and the collaborating universities. The program is also recognized by the United States Distance Learning Association and it award Dr. Liang "Best Practices Award for Excellence in Distance Learning Teaching in the field of Online Technology" in May, 2015.