This is one of the book series, Interviews with the Prestigious Teachers of TCFL conducted by BLCU. It faithfully records the interview with Li Jinghui, an old professor of Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU). By asking questions, this book notes down Prof. Li’s teaching experience of forty years and discusses the topics such as classroom teaching, textbook compilation and teaching evaluation. It also illustrates Prof. Li’s ideas on teaching and academic research. This book is a biography in which Prof. Li shares the story of her life with us; it is also an academic work in which the history of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL) in the past forty years is appraised. Prof. Li’s thoughts on TCFL are reviewed in this book as well. The carefully selected papers written by Prof. Li and how the author felt after the interview with Prof. Li are included in the appendix. Unlike a general academic work, this book is fresh in style and easy in narration. Readers will be greatly enlightened after reading it.

Professor Li Jinghui, born in Tianjin in 1929, began to teach foreign students Chinese since 1953 and taught at Beijing University (Peking University), Beijing Foreign Language Institute (now Beijing Foreign Studies University) and Beijing Language Institute (now Beijing Language and Culture University) respectively. When she taught in the past over 30 years, Prof. Li always takes an active part in Chinese language teaching and research. From 1955 to 1957, she was in charge of Yucai School in Nanning of Guangxi; meanwhile, she was the leading official of Chinese teachers at Guilin Chinese Language Education School. She was awarded Vietnam “Labor Medal” for the extraordinary achievements she made in the teaching field. In 1960s, she was involved in a number of textbook compilation and teaching experiments. She was praised by Edgar Snow for his demonstration class on teaching Chinese oral expressions in 1964. This class was also filmed and became a model teaching class. She was responsible of researching the national TCFL textbook in 1986 and the formulation of Outline of HSK Levels in 1987.