Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Wang On OBU Staff

Aihua Wang, professor of Chinese language, is spending a year at Ouachita Baptist University in the third year of an international exchange program with Peking University in Beijing, China.

Each year Ouachita through its Daniel R. Grant International Studies Program, sends a professor to teach at Peking for a semester, and Peking sends a professor to teach at Ouachita for a year. Peking University shares this exchange program with only two universities: Ouachita and Pennsylvania State University.

Wang holds a masters degree in English from Peking University. She is teaching the Chinese language to OBU students, many of whom she taught this past summer in Peking, when they visited through a summer exchange program.

One of the students who traveled to China this summer as part of the exchange was T.K. Zellers, a junior sociology major from Fort Smith. Zellers is taking elementary Chinese II from Wang at OBU during the 1997 fall semester. Speaking very highly of Wang, Zellers says, ?She is wonderful. It is unbelievable how fluent she is in English and how easy she makes learning the complicated language.?

Zellers feels that ?no one?s educational process can be complete without studying overseas and being exposed to other cultures? and that ?the exchange program?s value is immeasurable.?

Another student of Wang?s is Bryan Dykes, a senior political science major from Peachtree City, Ga. Dykes traveled to China in 1996, so Wang is his third international teacher. Dykes is in Wang?s intermediate Chinese class.

Dykes really enjoys Wang?s laid back style of teaching, allowing students to work at their own pace. He said her classroom setting as ?comfortable and easy.? Dykes also expressed how fortunate he feels to be a part of the exchange program. ?Peking University is the elite of the elite in China,? he said. ?All of the top Chinese students, the world leaders of tomorrow, are learning English from my Chinese teacher, Ms. Wang.?

Dykes thinks it is unbelievable that the experience and education the teacher of the best in China are coming from Arkadelphia and Ouachita. ?All I have to say is wow and how lucky are we to have such a program!?

Wang says that she was asked to participate in the program, because she works in the English department at the Chinese university and because she is ?responsible.? When asked how she feels about America, Wang quickly replied without hesitation, ?I really like it. It is very pretty and much cleaner than China. The air is so fresh.?

According to Wang, her students at OBU are very attentive and they do very well in their studies. Students at Ouachita are different from Peking students, though, because Peking students are very serious and rigid. She says OBU students are more laid back and friendly.

Commenting on her experience at Ouachita, Wang says, ?Although I haven?t visited other American universities, I get the feeling that OBU is different from other places. I think that students here obey the rules.? She said that Arkadelphia and Ouachita are friendly and very mannerly.

Wang loves the opportunity the exchange program provides for both herself and the students.