Dr Jennifer Yao is a lecturer and subject leader for Putonghua at the Division of Languages and Communication. Prior to joining this institution, she taught Putonghua to Cantonese and non-local students as a part-time lecturer at the City University of Hong Kong (CityU), where she also served as a teaching assistant for subjects on language and linguistics for the last few years, such as semantics, pragmatics, English syntax and grammar, language ideology and society, and language cognition and culture. She also had solid experience in teaching Chinese as a foreign language at Shanghai Tongji University and Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) before moving to Hong Kong.
 
Jennifer obtained her MA degree in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from SISU in Shanghai, and PhD degree in Linguistics from CityU. Her research interest focuses on linguistic and applied linguistics, especially on Chinese Linguistics, language acquisition in multicultural contexts, Putonghua Education in HK, teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and so on. Up to now, Jennifer has published more than 10 papers / proceedings, book chapters, as well as textbooks on linguistics and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.

In 2010, her paper, “Stage / Individual-level Predicates, Topics and Indefinite Subjects”, won the best student paper award in the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 24) in Sendai, Japan.