“Step into Practice: Chinese for Economics Series” serves as a bridge for international students to switch from basic Chinese learning to business and finance majors, and also a good medium for advanced students of Chinese and foreign practitioners to further improve their comprehensive Chinese application ability according to their actual work needs.

This series consists of 7 books: Chinese for Commerce: Comprehensive Course (1 & 2), Chinese for Finance: Comprehensive Course (1 & 2), Chinese for Commerce: Listening and Speaking, Chinese for Commerce: Writing and Chinese for Commerce: Culture, covering common topics in the fields of business and finance.

The textbook strives to make the top-level goal of “integrating knowledge, ability and quality” concrete and put into practice, and make the outline project, teaching content and style design reflect the training requirements of multiple knowledge abilities and quality indicators. In terms of knowledge, this book emphasizes business Chinese and economic and trade expertise, while in terms of ability, emphasis is placed on business Chinese listening, speaking, reading and writing, comprehensive ability to use Chinese to deal with business issues and cross-cultural communication ability. In addition, it also helps to cultivate teamwork spirit and international vision.

The Chinese for Commerce: Listening and Speaking Course in the series belongs to the Chinese language teaching materials for the training of specialized skills (listening and speaking) for special purposes (commerce). The book consists of 10 sections, each of which is centered  on a single topic, covering common business communication activities such as socio-economic, commercial and financial affairs, and trade transactions. The content of each section is carefully designed and combined in terms of topic design, text writing and ability cultivation, accompanying with the Chinese for Commerce: Comprehensive Course. With the overall idea of “Understanding and Analyzing - Classifying and Summarizing - Free Expressing”, the book assists students in learning commerce Chinese, forming business thinking patterns and improving business communication skills through the presentation of real cases and the simulation of real-life scenarios.

Zhai Yijiang（Editor-in-Chief ） is an associate professor and Master candidates’ supervisor of the School of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and was the Chinese director of the Confucius Institute at Heidelberg University in Germany. His main research focuses on teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages and comparative Chinese characterology. He has published textbooks such as the A 21st Century Course of Chinese as a Foreign Language.

Duan Mo (Deputy Editor-in-Chief) is a PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, and teacher at the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She has been teaching business Chinese courses for a long time and has won the second prize of school-level teaching competition and the first prize of college-level teaching competition. She has presided over four school-level teaching and research projects and one school-level teaching material project, and has published many papers on business Chinese teaching and task-based teaching.

Xu Xinyan (editor of this volume) is a teacher  of the International Chinese Education Center at the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and has visited Georgia Institute of Technology for one year. Her research mainly focuses on the methods of teaching Chinese as a foreign language and Chinese teaching for commerce. She has edited and co-edited New Horizon-College Chinese Tutorial 4, Intermediate Chinese II, Approaching Chinese - Advanced Writing, and the three volumes of the graded reader Reading China Level II .

As the special skills teaching material of “Step into Practice: Chinese for Economics Series”, Chinese for Commerce: Listening and Speaking Course continues the teaching objective of “ability cultivation as the core”, and is used in conjunction with Chinese for Commerce: Comprehensive Course and Chinese for Commerce: Writing in terms of topic setting, content arrangement, and ability point design and training, so as to achieve the goal of “integrating knowledge, ability and quality”.

This book adopts the case-based teaching method, focusing on training listening and speaking skills in specific situations, using simulated real corpus, scenarios and roles to present specific business communication activities, which facilitates learners to understand, memorize and master the relevant words and professional knowledge, and to gradually form professional habits and patterns of thinking in business communication. Business cases are presented in the form of “listening”, while the topic of “speaking” is consistent with “listening”, and the content is related and further extended. On the basis of input serving output, the input and output training are combined into a more practical “comprehensive practice”, and the task-centered teaching concept is adopted to put the training of “ability points” into practice.

This textbook can effectively cultivate learners’ professional ability in using Chinese for business communication, and can be used either in conjunction with the other volumes in the series, or on its own.

This book can be used as a general Chinese textbook for commerce majors studying in Chinese, and can be used in conjunction with other sub-volumes in the “Step into Practice: Chinese for Economics Series” (Chinese for Commerce: Comprehensive Course, Chinese Business Culture, Chinese for Commerce: Writing).

This book consists of 10 sections, each recommended to be completed in 8-12 class hours.