The Routledge Advanced Chinese Multimedia Course: Crossing Cultural Boundaries

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 teachers, the book offers advanced learners of Chinese a chance to consolidate their foundation in the language through a variety of activities, which are designed to develop both language skills and cultural literacy.

Divided into four thematic units covering popular culture, social change, cultural traditions and politics and history, each unit contains three lessons providing the student with a structured course which supports the transition from an intermediate to advanced level.

The 12 lessons are comprised of texts which present interesting and accurate information about contemporary China, introducing the student to useful vocabulary, speech patterns, and idiosyncratic language usage.

Key features include:

• lively and detailed discussions of grammatical points and sentence patterns
• exercises for developing grammatical concepts and insight into the character writing system
• systematic review of earlier material to ensure consolidation of learning
• extensive cultural and historical notes providing background to the subjects presented.
• complimentary CDs to enhance listening skills.

Further material can be found on the accompanying website at: http://duke.edu/web/chinesesoc/. This site contains a wealth of video content which forms the basis of many of the listening activities linked to topics within the book. 

The Teacher's Handbook, including activity tips, answer keys and the traditional character texts, can be requested from samantha.valenoya@tandf.co.uk.

Kunshan Carolyn Lee is an 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 an Assistant Professor of Chinese and the Director of Modern Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Virginia.

Liwei Jiao is a Lecturer of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania.

Julian K. Wheatley is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in Chinese at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Formerly he spent 10 years each at Cornell University and MIT in the dual roles of Senior Lecturer and Chinese Program Coordinator.