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Helen T. Lin (DAI Zhu Yu, 林戴祝悆, March 29, 1929 – April 6, 1986) was a professor of Chinese language and literature and founder of the Wellesley College Chinese Department. For two decades Lin broke barriers in the field of Chinese language pedagogy with original ideas that soon became mainstream. Under her direction, Wellesley had one of the most prominent undergraduate Chinese language programs in the U.S. Lin’s intellectual leadership was matched by her gifts in mentoring. Although young adults were her primary focus, Lin famously equipped Ronald Reagan with bridge-building proverbs when he traveled to China in 1984.

Early life and education
Helen T. Lin was born March 29, 1929 in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China, to DAI Chun Ren 戴君仁and KU Zhi Yuen 顧志鵷. Her father was a Chinese philologist and early scholar of ancient bone oracle writing. Lin spent her adolescence in wartime Beijing but moved to Taiwan in 1947 with the appointment of her father as chairman of the Classical Literature Department of National Taiwan University (NTU). In 1950, Lin graduated from NTU with a degree in agricultural economics, where she conducted research and taught until 1954.

Life as an educator
In 1957, Lin changed her career direction, joining the United States Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Language School in Taichung, where she taught Chinese until 1962. While at FSI she published an outline on Chinese agricultural economics (1958) and a Chinese play (1959). Going forward, she would evolve these two ideas—updating classroom materials to reflect Chinese as people speak it and motivating holistic learning through drama—into key elements of her pedagogy. During the 1960s, Lin advanced a third revolutionary idea, now a mainstream practice, that the whole language, including speaking, listening, reading and writing, should be introduced from the beginning. From 1962 to 1966, she taught Chinese at Yale Institute of Far Eastern Languages (IFEL); and in 1964 she served the supervisor of Taipei Language Institute’s (TLI) Mandarin Department, where she published A Chinese Language Teaching Methods Guide (1965). In 1966, with funding from the Edith Stix Wasserman Foundation, Lin joined Wellesley College to establish its Chinese language program. Initially, she created by hand all teaching material used for each class. In 1969, she produced a Chinese character version of the textbook Speak Mandarin (Yale University Press) for her Wellesley classes, to accompany the Student’s Workbook (1967) co-authored with Henry C. Fenn, the original architect of Yale’s Chinese language program. (1982 CV, p. 28) In 1970, the Chinese program became a full-fledged department, and Lin was promoted to Assistant Professor and Chairman. Course offerings included Reading in Modern Style Writing, Reading in Contemporary Chinese Literature, Introduction to Literary Chinese, and Reading in Elementary Classical Chinese. She established an Interdepartmental Major Chinese Studies and Individual Major East Asian Studies, which Lin and Professor Paul Cohen of the History Department co-directed. Lin was promoted to Associate Professor in 1972 and Professor in 1978. From 1980 to 1982, she held the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship – a rotating endowed a professorship that honors individuals who have distinguished themselves both as scholars and as teachers, particularly those involved in undergraduate teaching. Lin was awarded the Pinanski Teaching Prize honoring teaching excellence posthumously in 1986. In 2001, The Wellesley Magazine named Lin to the “faculty pantheon” in celebration of the College’s 125th Anniversary. Lin’s pedagogical influence spread in the 1970s following normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1971 and rising demand for Chinese language instruction. This was likely to be propelled by two factors: First, Lin’s insistence that mastery of Chinese required understanding of the social, cultural, and political milieu that drives its meaning and usage -- and ultimately the evolution of this language. Second, Lin’s efforts to hire native speakers who were born and spent their formative years –typically, during the Cultural Revolution -- the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), believing that their life experience far outweigh any formal academic credentials bestowed by American universities.

Influence beyond the classroom
Lin served on the Executive Board of the Chinese Language Teachers’ Association (1972-75), where she chaired the nominating committee (1973-74). She taught summers at the Middlebury College Chinese Summer School (1972-76) which she also directed (1973-76). In the 1970s and early 1980s, Lin consulted to multiple high school language and educational travel groups in the Boston area. In 1971, when Nixon made his historic trip to China, Lin directed a full-scale production of Sunrise by China’s great 20th Century dramatist Cao Yu, with a goal of unifying the Boston-Cambridge Chinese community. It was performed in Cambridge, MA, and New York. During 1975-76, Lin took a yearlong sabbatical to research modern Chinese syntax with funding from the Wellesley Research Fund and Helen S. French Fund. This resulted in the 1981 publication of Essential Grammar for Modern Chinese by Cheng and Tsui. For students, it is a comprehensive review and reference guide for grammatical problems and questions that arise throughout the early years of learning Chinese. Language teachers can use this book as a handy teaching manual, and linguists can use it as a practical reference and language source companion From 1979-81, with a grant from the William R. Kenan Foundation, Lin traveled to China to conduct extensive surveys on the evolving language. Hosted by The Central Academy for Nationalities, she shared her pedagogical methods with over 60 Chinese specialists and visited senior faculty of the Chinese literature and language departments at 14 major universities to exchange ideas about teaching Chinese These conversations led to the establishment of a Wellesley language program in China and at least four updated publications reflecting Lin’s pedagogy and her vision for bringing the U.S. and China closer together: Essential Grammar for Modern Chinese, published by Cheng and Tsui (1981); “Survey of Commonly Used Expressions of People from Various Walks of Life in the People’s Republic of China” through the U.S. Center for Applied Linguistics (1982); Beginning Standard Chinese in two volumes, published by Beijing Foreign Languages Press (1988); and Speaking about China (话说中国) in two volumes, co-authored by Lin and Du Rong (杜荣) and published by Foreign Languages Press (1985).