Chinese Now! is compiled for the Chinese immersion teaching of American primary schools. Other types of primary schools can also use it selectively for their Chinese teaching.
The characteristics of this series of textbooks:
1. It is suitable for the general curriculum of the immersion teaching for primary Chinese, namely, half immersion of Chinese teaching, 5 days per week and 1 to 1.5 hours per day.
2. It is suitable for the characteristics of primary Chinese immersion teaching, following the general rule of foreign language learning and the characteristics of Chinese learning, and combining implicit learning and explicit learning, namely presenting in the form of stories, narration, and pictures description. Besides, it also includes the learning of implicit language elements (voice, vocabulary, grammar and character) and the training of communicative ability.
3. It is suitable for the practical situation of teaching, helping students learn Chinese through stories, activities, and games, ensuring that students have enough listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities. It can help students accumulate Chinese characters solidly, improve the ability to listen, speak, read, and write steadily, and avoid stagnation in a certain stage caused by weak base of Chinese.
4. It aims to solve the problems about Chinese characters learning and the development of reading ability. In this series of textbooks, there are abundant Chinese character contents for helping students understand and remember Chinese characters through games, activities, and characters that can reflect their basic rules. These Chinese characters will appear repeatedly in different sections and situations to help students remember and accumulate. In addition, students can improve their ability to recognize and read Chinese characters through a lot of reading practice.
5. It can provide abundant teaching materials for teachers. Besides texts, this series of textbooks also provide rich Chinese teaching materials and suggestions about teaching and activities, such as comprehension questions, vocabulary exercises, pattern drill, Chinese characters exercises, classifying vocabulary, verses, and ballads. All these can greatly save teachers’ time and provide some teaching instructions for novice teachers.
Prof. Cui Yonghua, the chief author, is a is a principal investigator in Beijing Language and Culture University. He has been engaged in the field of Chinese teaching and research since 1981. His research focuses on Chinese grammar, Chinese language teaching and Chinese information processing, and his publications include Classroom Techniques for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, Teaching and Research of Chinese as a Foreign Language (a collection of academic papers) and some textbooks coauthored with others, such as Standard Chinese Course, Learning Chinese and Learn Chinese through Listening, Speaking and Watching.
This series of books is suitable for immersion teaching of primary Chinese.
In these books, you can see children’s stories with texts and graphics, lively class games, rich and developmental homework, and efficient and interesting Chinese character exercises. Besides these, these books can also provide rich and complete teaching material, pragmatic and specific teaching advice, practical teaching methods, and matched and abundant teaching resources.
Suggestions for use: This series of textbooks includes 5 grades and is mainly for the use of 5 primary school years. Chinese Now! (Grade 2) includes 24 lessons that can be used for 24 weeks’ formal curricula in 1 school year. That means students go to school 5 days per week, 1 to 1.5 hours for Chinese class per day, and learn 1 lesson per week. Ordinary primary schools can choose learning content according to teaching time and arrange teaching. It is advised that new words, texts, and Chinese characters be necessary contents to learn. Other contents can be used selectively according to the actual situation of teaching.