Shuhan C. Wang, Ph.D. (王周淑涵) is the President of ELE Consulting International, LLC, in which she provides technical assistance, teacher professional development, curriculum, material, and assessment development, and program establishment and evaluation to parties interested in language education. She is the Senior Advisor to Asia Society on Mandarin Language Education and the Director of the Chinese Early Language and Immersion Network (CELIN) at the Asia Society. Since 2012, she has been an advisor to the Singapore Ministry of Education on its Chinese as a Mother Tongue primary and secondary curriculum development projects.

One of Dr. Wang’s academic interests is language policy and planning. Through her work as Deputy Director of the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) at the University of Maryland, she was able to apply theory into practice. As the Co-Principal Investigator and on the leadership team of the STARTALK Project, she led the efforts to establish and implement the infrastructure of a multi-million and multi-year federal program delivering summer learning for teachers and students of 13 critical languages. As the Executive Director for Chinese Language Initiatives at the Asia Society, she organized and coordinated the efforts to promote the study of Chinese at local, state, and national levels in the United States. As Education Associate for World Languages and International Education for the State of Delaware, she connected the learning and teaching of Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Spanish, and Russian with Social Studies and Arts education and forged international partnerships with various embassies, schools, and study abroad. Her roles as President-Elect for the National Council for the State Supervisors For Languages and the National Association of Chinese Heritage Language Schools also allowed her to engage in language policy and planning.

Her experiences teaching in K-12, heritage language schools, universities, and teacher preparation programs have deepened her understanding of issues ranging from establishing to sustaining effective language programs and teacher development. Her vision and ability to synthesize and communicate the state of the art in language education has enabled her to work effectively with schools, school districts, immersion programs, and government agencies in varied settings. Examples of program evaluation, curriculum development, and teacher professional development include her work with the Center for Applied Linguistics, the North Carolina Online Mandarin Program, the Maryland Elementary World Language-STEM Curricular Modules and Elementary Language Teacher Development, the Sesame Workshop Mandarin Project, K-12 Mandarin language curricula of Ross Institute (New York), Chicago Public Schools, the Delaware Middle School Chinese Dual Language Immersion Programs, and teacher development in schools in China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand. She is a frequent speaker for workshops and conferences nationally and internationally.

Dr. Wang is also a prolific writer who has co-authored several textbook series for K-12 students. Presently, she is co-editor of a series of CELIN Briefs published by the Asia Society, which connects theory with practice for educators. Her scholarly work is published in books and peer-reviewed journals, including several seminal publications about the state of the Chinese field in the US and a white paper, The Teachers We Need, Transforming World Language Education in the United States (2010, NFLC). She has studied and co-authored several papers about the benefits and strategies of developing Chinese language immersion in preschools in recent years, including the white paper A Blueprint for Chinese Immersion Preschools in the United States: Imagining the Possibilities (Wang, Harvey, Wong & Peyton, 2022). Her most recent publication is The New Framework for Mandarin Language Education in PreK-Grade 12 Schools in the United States (2023).

Dr. Wang received her BA from National Taiwan University, an MA in Communication from Ohio State University, and a second MA in Bilingualism/TESOL from the University of Delaware. She received her Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. She may be reached at shuhancw@gmail.com.