About the Author

Jian Kang Loar received her BA in English and MA in English and linguistics at Huazhong University in Wuhan, China, where she also became an English lecturer. She came to Boston University on a presidential scholarship, and, subsequently, received her PhD in applied linguistics. Dr. Loar is Associate Professor of Chinese at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. She has been engaged in foreign language teaching her whole life, and she is conversant with foreign language learning and teaching theories and methodology. Her specialty is Chinese grammar and linguistics, primarily in the verbal aspectual system, the sentence information structure, and word order in Chinese. Dr. Loar is the author of several articles that have been published in the Journal of Chinese Linguistics and the Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association.