Introduction

Integrated course for elementary students aims at international students who have barely learnt Chinese. This course including Chinese phonetics, grammar, words and expressions and Chinese characters is designed to help students develop the ability of listening to Chinese listening, speaking, reading and writing.

The elementary integrated course (Intensive reading) is the core course of Chinese language learning. It is the base of other courses such as listening, speaking and reading, and these courses are mutual-influent. 

Teaching Aims

1. Help students understand and master pronunciation by practicing.

2. Help students to find the differences of each syllable, to form their own understanding on tones，and to pronounce Chinese four tones correctly.

3. Chinese characters will be taught along with the Chinese phonetics. Characters will be learnt through conversation and supposedly, till the end of elementary courses, 3500 characters will be acquired.

Grammars run through the elementary courses. Students are supposed to master grammar by learning texts and to master all grammars till the end of elementary courses.

4. About 4000 vocabularies in the textbook will be naturally learnt and used by students through the elementary learning period.

5. Dialogues and narrative essays are in the elementary textbooks. Students are supposed to converse fluently and to express themselves in paragraph.

The Contents and Requirements of the Elementary Chinese Language Course

This course will last for 1 academic year. (10 class hours per week, counting as 10 credits)

1. Teaching Contents 

1) Phonetics & Tones: At the beginning of learning Chinese, there will be about 2-week learning of phonetics, including phoneme, initial consonant，compound vowel, tones, the variants of “Bu” and “Yi”. And the phonetics will run through all the way during the Chinese language learning.

2) Chinese characters: Chinese characters will be learnt along with the phonetics and sentence patterns. 10 new characters per lesson at the beginning; 15-25 during the period of learning sentence patterns and grammars.

3) Speaking Chinese: Only by practicing Phonetics and Chinese characters in communicative conversations can students fully understand and commend them. Thus, texts during the elementary level are mostly dialogues and listening to, reading and reciting texts are the most important parts in classes. Students are supposed to practice by making up dialogues.

4)  Vocabularies: Most vocabularies will be learnt from dialogues and passages in the textbook. Thus, students can fully understand the context and the usages of every vocabulary. In the meantime, supplementary learning materials will be offered for a better understanding.

5)  Grammar: Intensive reading course is based on grammar. Through analyzing every text, giving more examples, practicing, students will have a better understanding of every grammar.

6) Practicing: Intensive reading course has understanding practice, imitation practice and communication practice both on and off class.

2. Teaching Requirements 

1) Pragmatism. What are taught in classes should be pragmatic, and can be used easily and frequently.

2) Practicality. Teachers will analyze in details and students should practice more in class. A large amount of real contexts should be put in the classes to help students have a good understanding and command of them.

3) Heuristic. Teacher will not keep instilling on classes but ask students to generalize and summarize themselves by ask & answer.

4) Equilibrium. With so many students with different backgrounds from different countries, teachers have to keep the equilibrium in the class. Students who have been grounded in Chinese characters are supposed to help the others for an active and balanced class circumstance. 

Teaching Steps and Methods 

· Teaching Steps

Teachers should organize classes, talk to students and learn about them.

Review previous contents. Students should be asked to do dictation, read texts, recite texts and do exercise books.

1. Teaching

1) Grammar will be taught in the way of demonstration. Plenty of learning materials will be given to students to summarize the grammar taught.

2) Explanation of new words. Teachers have to correct students’ pronunciations and explaining key words.

3) Explanation of new texts. New texts will be taught by reading (repeating and reading in roles), ask & answer, imitating, etc.

2、Homework.

1) Homework usually includes transcribing, sentence-making and paragraph-writing.

2) Preview new text and words. Students can follow teachers’ reading and writing.

· Teaching Methods

1. Teacher demonstration

2. Student imitation

3. Group practicing of students

4. Ask & Answer

5. Scenarios Simulation

6. Mission Accomplishment

7. Express in Free Paragraph 

Test 

1. This is a course results test, not for testing language level, while will also reflect the comprehensive abilities with various question types. Students must finish the closed-book test within the fixed time. The total score is 100.

2. Question Types

· Write down Chinese phonetics or Chinese characters accordingly.

· Fill in the blank with the given words.

· Multiple choice.

· Sentence correction.

· Sentence making.

· Answer the questions.

· Complete the dialogues.

· Reading Comprehensive.

· Writing.

3. Test Form.

     Written test.