Rate My Professor Wei Hong

Dr. Wei Hong is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Chinese Language Program in the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University. She also holds the position of Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts, a role she has occupied since Fall 2016. Hong earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Purdue University in 1993, with a dissertation titled 'A cross-cultural study of requests in Chinese and German,' and her M.A. in German from Tongji University in Shanghai, China, in 1986. She joined the Purdue faculty in 1994 as an Assistant Professor of Chinese and has progressed to full professor.

Hong's research specializations encompass Chinese Linguistics, Pragmatics, Second Language Acquisition, and Business Chinese. Her scholarly work includes studies on requests in German, English, and Chinese; intercultural pragmatics of apology and refusal; teaching Chinese as a second language; distance Chinese; and business Chinese. Key publications feature the books Practical Business Chinese (1997 and 2007 editions), 'Refusals in Chinese: How Do L1 and L2 Differ?' (2011), 'Cross-Cultural Training in Business Chinese' (2010), and contributions to 'Online Business Chinese Speaking Instruction' (2012) and 'Transforming Chinese Language Learning through Community Engagement: A Mixed-Methods Study of Service-Learning' (2024). In 2010, she was elected to the Board of Advisors of the Chinese Language Teachers Association in the US and has since served as a faculty reviewer for Chinese language programs for the American Council on Education. Hong regularly reviews manuscripts for major publishers, including Prentice Hall Publications, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Yale University Press, and Georgetown University Press. She is a frequent invited speaker to business communities, MBA classes, K-12 educators, and academic conferences, delivering talks on Chinese business culture and etiquette, research in Chinese language pedagogy, and cross-cultural communication. Hong teaches Chinese Language Courses from Level I to IV and Distance Chinese Levels I to II.