Advanced Modern Chinese: Learning Through Contemporary Film

Advanced Modern Chinese: Learning through Contemporary Film aims to develop advanced-level Chinese students’ language skills through movies and broaden their knowledge about China, while also developing their appreciation of the artistic characteristics of film.

This textbook is based on the principles of content-based instruction and ACTFL Foreign Language Proficiency Guidelines for the "advanced" level. The authors carefully selected ten movies, of which eight were released after 2015, by filmmakers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United States. Rich themes are covered in this book and placed in ascending order from easy to difficult. The authors provide an informative movie critique in each lesson, followed by exercises on new words and grammar, pre-class preparation questions, in-depth classroom discussion points and after-class exercises on reading and writing. The authors also provide commentary on film cinematography covering topics such as film type, lens type, sound, editing and light in order to allow students to explore and analyze the artistic characteristics of film more systematically.

This textbook is specially designed for advanced-level Chinese students to learn Chinese through movies.

Yujia Ye is an assistant instructional professor in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, USA.

Shu Zhang is an instructor in the department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, USA. She has co-authored Test Syllabus Interpretation for International Chinese Language Teacher Certificate.