t was a sunny afternoon when I first met Miss Ling Rong, who was honored “The Excellent Teaching Award” of Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) in 2015. She was sitting beside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Japanese style building in her maroon jacket, with two piles of homework at her hand.

“I feel just as happy as I did the first time, if not more so,” said Ling. In 2009 when the year happened to be her tenth year as a teacher, she won her first teaching award, which impressed her deeply.

Based in the School of Japanese Studies, she has successively taught intensive reading course, grammar of classical Japanese, Chinese-Japanese interpretating and many other courses during her years of teaching. She said: “Every course has its existential value, and I have been trying to present the best part of them to my students as a method to enjoy learning and to help improve themselves.”

She had made one breakthrough after another with her aggressive, innovative and bold attempts of teaching reforms, which was praised by the teachers and students and largely promoted the development of the curriculums. The most typical was the contribution for Japanese pronunciation lessons, and her self-creating of Japanese pronunciation tutorial was adopted as official publication of teaching materials.

This course was initiated in SISU, and other colleges and universities nationwide rarely opened this course because the lack of suitable textbooks and experience. Faced with this situation, she decided to buy a lot of phonetic reference books at home and abroad, making self-compiled textbooks and lesson plans to improve through constant practice.

“It hard for me to believe that other teachers who took decades of time to write a textbook as I thought it was exaggerated until I did it on my own actually, and it’s worth time-taking," she said.

Ling told that when she decided to write a tutorial, one of her respectful teachers convinced her that it was a waste of time to make a tutorial, and she said nothing after listening to his words. But several years later, in a talk with that teacher, the man suddenly became serious and said: “After I have read the book you wrote, I found that I was totally wrong. I must apologize to you for what I have said, and sincerely I pay my homage to you.” Those words really touched the heart of Ling, and she decided to keep polishing it until the publication debut.

In October 2014, during the teacher training programs host by Shanghai Normal University, she delivered a lecture about Japanese pronunciation and phonetics and introduced her teaching methods to other schools, which was widely appreciated by those experts and peers.

Recalling that the purpose of publishing books on phonetics, she said, " It's all about students." In the course of her teaching, she found that many students suffered pronunciation problems even when they were in their senior year, which disturbed her a lot to solve this, she specifically asked the Japanese teachers in Japanese phonetic teaching methods and combined it with her own ideas into the books.

What’s more, she also cared for students about their daily life. For example, when it came to the Mid-Autumn Festival, she bought all kinds of moon cakes and distributed them to students who came from other places. After the mid-term exams, she bought reference books at her own expense to encourage the ones who played excellent performance.

She said: “Every word and every expression of the students shouldn’t be ignored. I trust them, appreciated them and valued their input in my life as they did it equally to me. I love them.”