Discussing Everything Chinese Part 1, Reading and Discussion

#1 Choice for 3rd-year and 4th-year College Chinese. Written by professors from top Universities in the U.S. In simplified and traditional characters. In this new edition, we kept the topics of the first eleven lessons from the previous version but made small modifications to the dialogues and texts so they are more up to date and relevant. Three new topics are added: Ordinary People and Children of the Elite (Lesson 4), Democracy and the Modern Life (Lesson 6) and Influence of Contemporary Arts (Lesson14). This made both Part 1 and Part 2 of this new edition contain seven topics. Adding these three new lessons allows students to discuss more current topics. It also better distributes the amount of new vocabulary across each lesson and creates new contexts for the students to review and practice them. In Part 1, the 7 topics are: Heroes Through Chinese Eyes; Women's Social Status; Education and School Life; Ordinary People vs. Children of the Elite; Social Organizations and Social Activities in China; Democracy and Modern Life; Life of the Elderly. Notes of reviewed vocabulary from pervious lessons are added to the listening dialogues, reading texts, sample sentences and workbook exercises. This will make it easier for students to preview and review each lesson. At the same time, it will give instructors flexibility to select or shuffle the lessons to best fit their needs. We also included the transcripts of the dialogues at the end of the listening section and added more speaking activities related to the students’ daily life. We also filmed a skit for each lesson to teach action verbs and narrative abilities and added warm-up activities, culture notes and authentic materials to each topic. In the workbook, vocabulary exercises are given in chunks to help students review vocabulary in corresponding stages. Exercises in Chinese characters are also given to help student memorize them more systematically and to strengthen their concept of character-based lexicon learning.

Lili Teng Foti has a PhD. in Educational Psychology and a M.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language. She has taught at Wellesley College, College of the Holy Cross, Yale University, Harvard University and Williams College. Rongzhen Li is a senior Chinese lector at Yale University. She has a M.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language and a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature. She has taught at Princeton in Beijing program, Harvard Beijing Academy, Startalk program and supervised the Chinese language sector at the Institute for the International Education of Studies Beijing program. Yu-lin Wang is a senior Chinese lector at Yale University. She has a B.A. and a M.A. in Chinese Literature. She has taught classical and modern Chinese at the Inter-University Program (Taipei), Middlebury Summer Language School, Connecticut College, and San Francisco State University. Wei-Hsuan Lo has a M.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language and a B.A. in Business Administration. She has taught Chinese Language at College of the Holy Cross, Hunter College(CUNY), University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Chinese Flagship program.