Developing Advanced Proficiency in Chinese Through Debate

Developing Advanced Proficiency in Chinese through Debate provides lesson plans for holding high-level debates in the classroom.

The lesson plans in this textbook were created based on the standards of the Oral Proficiency Interview held by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. These lesson plans train students in advanced language tasks such as giving thorough descriptions and narrations, comparing abstract concepts, and establishing hypotheses. The lesson plans in this textbook will train students in dialectical thinking and give them opportunities to improve their ability to summarize, make inductions, and contrast hypotheses.

The debate topics of each lesson plan emphasize areas that are familiar to the lives and interests of Western students while still allowing them to engage with differences between Chinese and Western culture. The lesson plans address a wide range of topics, such as employment, financial management, psychoactive drugs, and artificial intelligence. Furthermore, every lesson plan includes material to help students practice listening and contains lesson-specific vocabulary, discussion questions, debate prompts, debate tactics, and grammar practices. Accompanying e-resources are available at https://advancedchinese.byu.edu/.

This book is suitable for students who have acquired high levels of proficiency in Chinese or who have taken at least three years of college level study of Chinese as their second language. Teachers will also be able to use the structure of the lesson plans in this textbook to assist them as they design assessments for their students.

ShuPei Wang is a Chinese professor at Brigham Young University. She is a recipient of two university awards. She mentored students who participated in the international Chinese Bridge speech contest in 2016 and 2019. One student placed in the top ten and another student finished in the top three at the global stage, becoming the North American champion.

Yina Ma Patterson is an adjunct Chinese instructor at Brigham Young University. Her Chinese teaching experience ranges from beginning to advanced level courses at BYU and at the summer language program at Indiana University. She worked in the Chinese Flagship Program at Indiana University for five years. Her research interests include Chinese linguistics, Chinese pedagogy, and second language studies.

Lin Guo is an adjunct Chinese instructor at Brigham Young University. He received a master’s degree in second language teaching with emphasis on Chinese teaching from Brigham Young University in 2018. He obtained a JD (Juris Doctor) from Northwest University of Law and Politics in China in 2004.