Weisi Cai

Weisi Cai is a Chinese Program Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her B.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language from Beijing Language and Culture University and her M.A. in Chinese Linguistics and Language Acquisition from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Before joining UC Berkeley in 2011, Cai taught Chinese at Brown University and at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies (IUP) at Tsinghua University. At Berkeley, she teaches Chinese language courses at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels, including courses for both heritage and non-heritage learners.

Her teaching and research interests include Chinese morphology and second language acquisition, incidental vocabulary learning, multiliteracies and multimodality in language education, and the integration of authentic digital and multimedia materials into Chinese language instruction. Her pedagogical work focuses on developing learners’ linguistic, intercultural, and critical literacy through diverse textual, visual, and digital media.

Cai has also been involved in curriculum development and pedagogical research on technology-enhanced, hybrid, and multimodal Chinese language instruction. Her work explores innovative approaches to Chinese language teaching that connect language learning with authentic materials, cultural content, and learners’ diverse linguistic and literacy backgrounds.