Welcome

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Angela Lee-Smith, Ph.D.
Senior Lector II

Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Office: 432 Temple St. #300
Email: angela.lee-smith@yale.edu
Phone: 203-432-4114

Korean Program Coordinator (AY2008-2020)/Interim Coordinator of the Japanese Program (AY2019-20)

 

Welcoming Remarks:

Greetings!

I have been a member of the language faculty in the department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University since 2003, and my research areas include language pedagogy, curriculum development, assessment, and teaching-learning materials development: Project-based integrating Multiliteracies, Interculturality, Interdisciplinary Contents, and The Standards approaches.

During my career, I have been trying to keep a good balance between the three major areas of professional endeavor–Teaching, Scholarship, and Service (including professional collaborations)–and have been active in each of these areas. I am deeply thankful to my colleagues in the field of language education and my current institution for giving me such great opportunities to take my small but meaningful role.

I strive to help my colleagues and students make the best use of each of their members’ contributions through meaningful social experience and collaboration to develop their intellectual, civic, and creative capacities to the fullest.

I deeply value and believe that collaborative and cooperative interaction build diverse views and produces meaningful outcomes after all. For example, as for instructional collaboration among colleagues, I often create  research projects and invite colleagues to collaborate. Also, I found it is very helpful and useful to organize events, such as brown-bag lunch forums, peer-mentoring, teaching ideas /practices share fair.  For institutional collaboration among faculty and students across institutions, I propose collaborative projects across institutions (e.g., cultural festival, pedagogical workshops, guest speakers, developing assessments). For engaging with school/local communities within and beyond the institution to enrich the educational applications and contexts for students, I develop community-based learning, service-learning, and mentoring project to foster the application of facts/skills to solve problems and the relation of facts to real-life contexts outside the university setting. Lastly, but most importantly, for (inter)departmental collaboration, I design curriculum by connecting language program and content courses within or across programs/departments (e.g., a Korean language section of a Korean modern literature/ history/politics course). By working collaboratively in a variety of settings, we can make learning and teaching more equitable and relevant.

Please refer to my teaching portfolio that reflects on what I have been doing in my career. You will find  my relevant qualifications for the position, current curriculum vitae, evidence of teaching effectiveness, and professional commitment to building an inclusive and diverse campus community.

It is my great pleasure to work together with faculty within and across departments and institutions to make a meaningful contribution to foster growth and innovation in program development in the field of language education.

My dedication and work highlights can be summarized as following:

I. Teaching

1. Recognized on campus as a model of excellence in the areas of teaching and learning:

  • Sustained and documented records of excellent teaching, which includes student ratings and peer evaluations
  • Documented samples of student work that demonstrate learning, as well as a narrative self-evaluation showing attention to teaching development
  • Participated in teaching development programs through the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, Center for Language Study, or received other forms of recognition—Professional Certifications

2. Participates as a central and essential component of the department’s program:

  • Demonstrates extraordinary success in enriching and enhancing learning and in creating opportunities for students
  • Engages in pedagogical work such as the development of instructional resources and/or innovative teaching methods
  • Contributes substantially to teaching programs:
      • Advising
      • Receiving recognition on or beyond campus for disciplinary or cross-disciplinary pedagogy
      • Developing new courses or substantial improvement of existing ones
      • Contributing significantly to training and mentoring graduate student teaching fellows

II. Pedagogical Research and Development

  • Publications
  • Grants and Projects
  • Presentations

III. Service

Long-standing and sought-after service to the department, university, and broader community; recognized as an engaged citizen and mentor for students, graduate teaching fellows, and faculty colleagues:

  • Service to the home institution
  • Service to the field

Bio:

Angela Lee-Smith, Senior Lector II and Coordinator (2008-2020) of the Korean Program, specializes in Korean language pedagogy and development of curriculum, materials, and assessment for Heritage Language/Foreign Language learners of Korean. She received her Ph.D. in Korean Linguistics: Language Education from Sangmyung University, Korea, with her dissertation research focusing on  A Study of Teaching Korean Auxiliary Verbs Through the Lexical Approach. Joining the EALL in 2003, she established and developed the Heritage Track (an accelerated and separate track for heritage learners of Korean) and the program curriculum. Before joining Yale, she had taught at Brown University and Sogang University in Korea. Her research interests include Korean linguistics and language pedagogy: Multiliteracies-based, Standards-based, Interdisciplinary Content-based, and Project-based Approaches. She is certified as ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) Tester/Rater,  Writing Proficiency Test (WPT) Rater, and an Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL) rater in Korean.  Recently she and her colleagues completed the national collaborative project, AATK Standards-Based College-Level Korean Language Curriculum Development (2012-2015), and Korean Textbook  & Workbook Series (Level1~6) Revision Project for English Speaking Heritage Korean Learners in K-12 Setting (2017).  She also served on the R. Light Fellowship Executive Committee (2008-2020) and Language Study Committee(2014-2019), and serving on the Korean Studies Initiative Committee (2018-Present), Committee of ITS (2020~ Present) at Yale, and SAT Subject Test -Korean for the College Board (2018~ Present). Previously, she served as the Executive Board Officer-Treasurer (2012-2015) of the American Association of Teachers of Korean (AATK) and currently serves as an Executive Board Member of the AATK (2016-2019) and the Society of Korean Semantics, Secretary of the ACTFL Korean SIG (2017-2018), and editorial board of the International Journal of Korean Language Education. She received the Richard H. Brodhead ’68 Prize for Distinguished Teaching (2017, Yale College); Rosenkranz Award for Pedagogical Advancement (2019, Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning); A. Whitney Griswold Research Award (2020, Whitney Humanities Center) at Yale University.