The Routledge Advanced Chinese Multimedia Course: Crossing Cultural Boundaries is an innovative multimedia course for advanced students of Chinese. Written by a team of highly experienced instructors, the book offers advanced learners the opportunity to consolidate their knowledge of Chinese through a wide range of activities designed to build up both excellent language skills and cultural literacy.
Divided into four thematic units covering popular culture, social change, cultural traditions, and politics and history, with each unit presenting three individual lessons, the volume provides students with a structured course which efficiently supports the transition from an intermediate to an advanced level. The many different texts featured throughout the lessons present interesting and accurate information about contemporary China and introduce students to useful vocabulary, speech patterns, and idiosyncratic language usage.
Key features include
- Lively and detailed discussions of grammatical points and sentence patterns
- Engaging exercises for developing grammatical concepts and insight into the character writing system
- Systematic review of earlier material to ensure consolidation of learning
- Coverage of diverse and culturally relevant topics such as online dating, changing views of marriage, food culture, Confucianism and democracy in China.
- Extensive cultural and historical notes providing background to the subjects presented
- Complementary downloadable resources to enhance listening skills.
- Free companion website (http://duke.edu/web/chinesesoc/) offering a wealth of video content forming the basis of many of the listening activities linked to topics within the book.
Extensively revised and updated throughout, this new edition includes new material and activities on synonyms and substantial improvements to the "composition", "Focus on characters" and "Language practicum" sections.
The improved Instructor’s Resource Manual, which includes activity tips, additional exercises, answer keys and the traditional character texts, is available at http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415841337/
Kunshan Carolyn Lee is Associate Professor of the Practice and the Director of the Chinese language program in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University.
Hsin-hsin Liang is Associate Professor of Chinese and the Director of Chinese Language Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Virginia.
Liwei Jiao is Lecturer in Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania.
Julian K. Wheatley is currently Adjunct Associate Professor at Tulane University. He has directed Chinese language programs at Cornell University (11 years) and at MIT (9 years). More recently, he held visiting positions in Chinese language at Singapore’s National Institute of Education and at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.
