Publisher's Synopsis
A unique effort in the CHINESE LEARNING SERIES is the strong push on developing student's reading comprehension in Chinese, although high quality education on other skills are also provided in high standard, e.g. verbal communication and writing. Reading comprehension is known as one of the most challenging bottlenecks in Chinese education as a second language. The best practices to be incorporated in our program are based on 1) modern second language education theories; 2) maximum language input; and 3) student centric curriculum, instruction and assessment. CHINESE LEARNING SERIES adopts a "maximum acquisition" methodology, which is designed based on Stephen Krashen's "Input Hypothesis," pedagogy and educational psychology. Basically, CHINESE LEARNING SERIES students acquire Chinese in a natural order by receiving comprehensible and constructional verse input from classical poems. Multimedia tools are incorporated in CHINESE LEARNING SERIES, e.g. pictures, animation, software and character cards that help students memorize and reflect the Chinese characters that they learnt. Students maximize their language input utilizing poems, animation, games and other effective and interactive means in classroom and at home. Students learn while "playing." CHINESE LEARNING SERIES teaching and practice materials are easy to follow and fun to use. It has been proven highly effective to have young children reading and reciting famous poems during the past two years. It helps to develop and establish student's Chinese language sense. "Recitation" not only overcomes the learner's anxiety of "foreign language," but also turns tacit knowledge into explicit language. The repetition rate in CHINESE LEARNING SERIES is determined based on the laws of forgetting rate in human, e.g. the contents need to be repeated 6 times at different time points to ensure the students memorizing what they learned. Exercises and reviews after school are weighed equally important as what they learned in class. The CHINESE LEARNING SERIES development team has put in substantial efforts in designing student homework exercise materials, which include the use of multimedia CD with sound, animation, games and other interactive exercises, the word cards and reading exercises on paper. In general, all contents will be reviewed 6 times in different ways in six months so that the students can achieve a permanent memory. We also ask students to listen stories we provide to them at least twice a week. Listening is an important component in building language senses. During the entire six-year CHINESE LEARNING SERIES instruction, the development of reading comprehension progresses following the order of "listening to read," "semi-independent reading" and "independent reading."
