Congratulations to Henny Yeung for receiving the SFU Excellence in Teaching Award. This award recognizes outstanding educators who inspire and facilitate student learning in ways that make a sustained, substantial, and positive influence on how students think, engage, and act in the world. 

Henny Yeung is an associate professor at the Department of Linguistics, where he serves as Graduate Program Chair. Yeung is the director of the Language Learning and Development (LangDev) Lab. He leads a team of researchers that investigates how infants and young children acquire their mother tongue(s), as well as how adults learn additional languages. 

In the classroom, Yeung is known for his innovative teaching approach. By adding components and exercises that encourage students to explore linguistic concepts during their normal daily activities, Yeung emphasizes experiential and student-driven learning. “Experiential learning can make a difference to student motivation and appreciation of the course content.”

Yeung continues to recognize the value of updating and expanding his pedagogical proficiency. He often participates in seminars and workshops offered by SFU’s Centre for Educational Excellence. Yeung applies the knowledge gained from this professional development directly into his teaching practices, such as revising learning outcomes and updating course aims based on the latest research in active learning. “Teaching keeps me on my toes, challenging me to make connections between linguistics and students’ individual interests and passions. Every time I teach, I get new questions or new ways of thinking about topics that I thought I knew well. Learning is a two-way street!”

Yeung also facilitates student engagement with the wider community. He established a partnership with Science World and the SFU Childcare Society, through which he has led hundreds of undergraduate students to design and implement “language games” with young children in order to gain insight into childhood language acquisition. “The discipline of linguistics is often a heavily theoretical one, requiring students to comprehend and employ abstract concepts in the analysis of texts and speech. However, decades of research have worked towards strengthening the links between linguistic theory and everyday human experiences of language. In the field of child language acquisition, these practically grounded theories help to explain children’s behaviours as they learn languages.” Yeung adds that the support of his SFU colleagues has been invaluable, as they have shared teaching resources, given peer feedback, and facilitated this partnership with the community. 

By dedicating a significant amount of time and effort to mentoring students and training undergraduate researchers, Yeung has empowered students to take charge of their career goals and research aspirations. Among the large complement of undergraduate students that Yeung has employed over the years, many have been successful in pursuing graduate school, including Jiyun Daisy Choi, Farzana Ali, and Julianne Bittante.

Yeung is also dedicated to supporting the academic success of Indigenous students. One example of note is his support of the graduate students from the Indigenous Languages Program (INLP). Although Yeung does not teach courses in the program, he took the initiative to organize funding for two INLP graduate students, Martina Joe and Randeana Peter, so that they could travel to a conference in Prague to present their research on Indigenous language revitalization.

Department Chair Panayiotis Pappas describes the impact that Yeung has on his students and the value that he brings to the whole department. “Dr. Yeung’s integrity as a teacher, the earnest way in which he approaches his role, is evident in the excellent preparation of course materials, the large number of graduate and undergraduate students that he supervises in his lab, his consistent use of grants targeted to teaching innovation and undergraduate student support, and the high scores and enthusiastic comments provided in student evaluations.”