Jennifer Yao is an Assistant Lecturer, and subject leader for Putonghua at PolyU SPEED. Prior to joining SPEED, she taught Putonghua to Cantonese and non-local students as a part-time lecturer at the City University of Hong Kong, where she also served as a teaching assistant for subjects on language and linguistics for 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 earned her Master Degree in linguistics and applied linguistics from SISU, and she is now a PhD candidate in linguistics at CityU. Her research interest focuses on linguistic theories and their applications, especially on teaching Chinese as a foreign language, Chinese and English in contrast, Mandarin and Cantonese in contrast, 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. | 
