China Focus is a set of
comprehensive Chinese teaching materials specially designed for the Chinese
audiovisual-speaking course. The video clips are extracted from contemporary
Chinese social hot issues, feature programs, news, sitcoms, documentaries, talk
shows, interviews, entertainment programs, films and TV plays, micro films,
etc. Using abundant online video resources, it builds a natural-language-based
classroom teaching environment. While meeting students’ learning interest and self-development needs, it can stimulate their
learning enthusiasm and initiative to the greatest extent. This set of
textbooks gives full play to the Chinese audiovisual-speaking course’s function of being a window to the society, promoting
the integration of language learning and cultural understanding. This is volume 1 of the advanced level, including five
lessons on public welfare, travel, sport, commerce, and national conditions. Following
the pre-class, in-class and post-class goals, each unit of the course is
divided into six parts, i.e., warm-up, intensive watching and listening,
extensive watching and listening, enjoying the song, language practice, and
learning notes.
Wang Tao,
the Deputy Director of Center for Audiovisual-Speaking Teaching of the School
of Chinese at Beijing International Studies University, is the lead author of “China Focus: Chinese Audiovisual-Speaking Course”. He focuses his research areas on mixed
teaching mode, integrated media teaching resources and video corpus
construction. He won the champion in the Contest of Young Teachers of Beijing
International Studies University and got the first prize in the Multimedia
Education Software Contest of Beijing. The textbooks he
compiled and the courses he taught have respectively won the High-quality Undergraduate
Textbook Award of Beijing Universities and the High-quality Undergraduate Course
Award of Beijing Universities.
Since it is a comprehensive course, it should follow the
principles of “focusing on brief explanation and frequent exercises” and
“providing language input before output”.