Learn Chinese with Me is a series of textbooks designed especially for overseas high school students. It is mainly targeted at students of Chinese language, aged between 15 and 18 years old, whose native language is English.
Learn Chinese with Me is a product of many years’ painstaking labor carried out with a passion and devotion to the cause of Chinese teaching. During the process of compiling this series (from the framework design to the selection and arrangement of the language materials), we have taken into consideration the latest research on the acquisition of Chinese as a second language, especially on the acquisition of Chinese by English-speakers, our own experiences of teaching Chinese as a second language and feedback from numerous other Chinese language teachers working on the front line. We were able to design the textbooks and arrange the content on the basis of a wide spectrum of knowledge and experience, both academic and practical.
This series of textbooks guides the students from beginner to low-intermediate level. The compiling principle is to foster high school students’ interest in learning Chinese. The content is natural and interesting and arranged in accordance with the rules of learning a second language. To cope with the general needs of conducting daily communication, the sentence patterns and grammar are presented to students in an order that emphasizes functional usage and the language materials are arranged within situational topics. The selection of these topics owes a great deal to overseas high school students themselves. In 2001, we conducted a survey among high school students in two North American cities on Topics That You’re Interested in, and the topics in this series of textbooks have been carefully selected based on this survey of over 500 questionnaires. It is our goal that this textbook series is, on the one hand, functional, pragmatic and interesting to the learner, and on the other hand, systematic, scientific, and academic.
The entire series of Learn Chinese with Me is composed of 12 books, including 4 Student’s Books, 4 Teacher’s Books, 4 Workbooks and other phonetic and listening materials and multimedia materials supplemented to the Student’s Books. The series can meet the needs of teaching Chinese to 9-12 grades in English-speaking countries and communities.
