Online Chinese Courseware
Check out our demo courseware.
The e-textbook uses Chinese culture as the content, with the dual purposes of introducing Chinese culture (historical stories, folklores, geography, social conventions and so on) and of helping learners to pick up the Chinese language along the way. The main story is based on the travel log of an American high school student who travels in China with her friends. Their travel experiences thread together Chinese historical stories, Chinese folklores, introduction of different Chinese locations and life style and social conventions in different locations. There will altogether be four volumes and each volume covers 7-8 regions in China (see attachment for syllabus of vol. 1). Each episode (learning unit) include about 10-hour of learning contents.
The design principles of the courseware are: 1) to integrate Chinese language and culture in a coherent way; 2) to ease the learning of Chinese; 3) to provide a variety of learning tools and incorporate various teaching methods to cater to different learning styles and needs; and 4) to make full use of the Internet to provide individualized learning and better learner management. The courseware adopts a new pedagogy in which English is proactively used to facilitate and ease the learning of Chinese, and to enable us to provide intriguing and rich culture-based learning materials to even the absolute beginners of Chinese. The courseware also features individualized learning, tracking learners’ performance data to provide adaptive learning materials for each learner and to help the tutors have a better understanding of each learner’s progress.
Each learning unit in this courseware has four modules: Language and Culture Exposure; Further Exploration; the Practice and the Cultural Expansion. These four modules are followed by a unit assessment. Each learning unit will be accompanied with various Learning Tools for pronunciation, dictionary, corpus and culture.
The Language and Culture Exposure module (the travel log) takes the form of intermittent narrations connecting flashbacks of conversations that occurred at the time of the expedition so as to be culture-intensive and at the same time conducive to the development of communicative competency. This module uses the pedagogy of embedding Chinese words within English texts to help learners pick up those words easily and within context. In this module, the learner can first choose to watch the whole episode for overall comprehension, and then start to do intensive exploration of the episode via detailed study of each focal Chinese word (definition, the use of each word in different contexts, pronunciation, character writing, listening and speaking practice) and of cultural highlights (textual and multimedia elaboration of each cultural highlight). In each travel log, the vocabularies include learned vocabularies (focal vocabularies in previous learning unit), focal vocabularies (required vocabularies) and exposure vocabularies (exposed but not required vocabularies). The exposure vocabularies increase exponentially in each succeeding learning unit.
The Further Exploration module includes the exploration of additional Common Words that have appeared in the scenes of the travel log; the Language Usage that delineates the socio-cultural connotations of some daily expressions; the section on Idioms and their stories features the idioms that have appeared in the travel log; the Grammar section focuses on some important Chinese grammatical structures and their difference from English grammatical structures.
The Practice module encompasses various listening, speaking, reading and writing practices around the language and cultural highlights in the travel log. Each part progresses from the drill and practice on basic units to the integrative use of language in more complex contexts.
The Cultural Expansion module includes expanded readings on Chinese History, Geography, Culture and Modern China. Those expanded cultural readings use English words arranged in Chinese syntactic order to serve the dual purposes of both cultural expansion and incidental grammar learning.
