Ielts-7-Writing

9
 BIOGRAPHY
Christiaan (Tian) Hattingh was born and bred in South Africa. He was blessed in being
raised in a bilingual home, with an Afrikaans-speaking father and an English-speaking
mother. In 1974, he completed a four-year training course as a forest manager from the
Saasveld Forestry College, now part of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. He
spent most of the next nine years as a training manager (in sawmilling) in the Southern
Africa timber industry. During this time, he studied the Zulu language, which is
considered to be the lingua franca of the region, as a third language.
In 1987, he completed a BA degree in psychology and philosophy at the University of
South Africa. Starting in 1974, he studied biblical Hebrew for three years at the same
university, and although he never achieved a formal academic qualification in the
subject, he soon felt obliged to share his knowledge with others who were equally
interested in learning more from the Old Testament. As a result of this yearning, he later
conducted part-time classes for beginners at the local Polytechnic in Rustenburg, South
Africa, where he was living at the time.
He has been an avid birder for the past forty-two years and is a founding member of the
Rustenburg branch of Birdlife South Africa. He has been birding in Botswana,
Zimbabwe, Namibia, Malawi, China, Thailand, and lately Vietnam. He has visited Israel
several times, first as a Christian pilgrim and later to study the birds of the region more
closely. Returning to South Africa in 2001, he presented talks on birding in Israel at
several Birdlife South Africa branches.
In 2002, he moved to mainland China, where he became an ESL/IELTS teacher. He was
fortunate in that the chief IELTS examiner for the Liaoning Province became his personal
tutor over the next two years. As a result, he got to know what IELTS examiners were
expecting from students in order to achieve an above-average band score. During his
fourteen-year stay in China, he studied and became proficient in Mandarin Chinese,
gaining even more insights into the efforts and skills needed when attempting to acquire a
new language. Subsequently, he has successfully tutored hundreds of IELTS students in
China and Vietnam over the past fifteen years.
In February of 2012, he published Birds and Bibles in History (ISBN 978-
1-907313-70-7), covering the history of the Tanakh, the history of
ornithology, and all 409 references to birds in the Old and New Testaments.
From September 2014, he conducted classes for beginners in biblical
Hebrew in the city of Shenzhen in China until March 2016, when he
relocated to Vietnam. He has been an ESL teacher / IELTS instructor and an online
biblical Hebrew teacher there since then.
Personal website: 
www.tianhattingh.com

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