CSL1

Course Descriptions

This course is designed to introduce Chinese pronunciation, basic grammar, vocabulary, and writing script for the students who have little or no background in the Chinese Language. Emphasis will be put on developing students' ability to acquire basic communication skills through constant use of the everyday idiom and repetitive practices on pronunciation, oral comprehension, and conversation. Students are strongly encouraged to use Chinese in the classroom whenever possible. Lectures, drills, multimedia software, and the Internet will be used to help students recognizing and reproducing Chinese tones and sounds, memorizing and learning how to write Chinese characters, and mastering syntactical structures and a grammatical idiom that differ fundamentally from those of their native languages.

Course Objectives and Expected Student Outcomes

By the end of the school year, students are expected to acquire the following competencies:

1. The ability to distinguish, to pronounce, and to write the individual syllables in the    phonetic system of Modern Standard Chinese.

2. The ability to write the Chinese Structures , to learn the stroke-orders, the components and the radicals. 

3. The ability to recognize, to read, to understand and write the (simplified) Basic Chinese Characters (about 100) and to recognize, to read and understand 223 simplified characters and phrases from Chapter 1-12 in the textbook.

4. The ability to read and comprehend what will be learned during this school.

5. The ability to engage in a simple conversation on familiar topics. Recognize and use various conventions of the use of the language.

6. To become familiar with some basic cultural information as presented in the textbook and ancillary materials.

7. The ability to learn how to use Chinese Dictionary by using the PinYin Method and the Radical Method.

8. The ability of using Chinese Software to type Chinese characters in computer.