1) The theme of the textbook starts with individuals and families and then expands to the Chinese and Asian American communities in the US, and eventually to the entire American society. Meanwhile, the discussion of the topics starts from the perspective of Chinese American students instead of Chinese people, thereby making this textbook distinct from other textbooks. Moreover, the texts incorporate both Chinese traditional culture and the history of Chinese Americans. The discussion questions and interpersonal and presentational tasks are designed for enhancing and furthering students’ content and language learning.

2) Each lesson contains one dialogue and one text. The dialogues, written in spoken language, are based on real life experiences. The content is humorous, which can engage students instantly. Compared with the dialogues, the short texts are written in a more formal register, and their content is related to the theme of the dialogue, which promotes a deeper understanding across cultures. This design allows students to see a corpus of writing styles and understand the differences between spoken and written Chinese. Each text is accompanied by an English translation so that beginner-level students can understand the content even though they may not be able to recognize every Chinese character. Characters should not become obstacles to reading. At the same time, learning Chinese characters after understanding the content will also give students more motivation to learn Chinese characters.

3) The activities in each lesson are designed with students’ strengths in mind. This design adopts a macro-approach that utilizes students’ existing speaking and listening skills to improve their reading and writing skills. In each lesson, there are listening comprehension exercises and pre-reading questions. In addition to warming up, these activities also encourage students to mobilize their funds of knowledge, thereby helping students read and understand the text better. At the same time, each dialogue in Chinese characters also comes with a pinyin text, which enables students to comprehend the content and get prepared for the discussion questions even if they cannot recognize all the characters.

4) Aside from vocabulary and grammar exercises, the textbook also includes tasks in the three modes of communication promoted by American Council on the Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL): interpersonal mode, interpretive mode, and presentational mode. Through these tasks, students can improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills all at the same time.

5) The learning objectives of each lesson are based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, guiding students to progress in many aspects, such as language learning, content learning, critical thinking ability, and cross-cultural communication skills.

Book Information
ISBN 9781032399775
Author Yan Liu
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd