Chinese Course is a series of textbooks for the major course of basic Chinese. It is divided into three books, each with two volumes. Books 1 and 2 are used in the first semester and Book 3 in the second. Characterized by practical language, lively content, abundant exercises and concise grammar, it is an excellent integrated series of textbooks for elementary Chinese learning, The content is taught at three stages: 1. Pronunciation Stage in which students are supposed to master the pronunciation skills and recognize some familiar Chinese characters; 2. Grammar Stage in which students begin to obtain basic conversational abilities through practicing dialogues in the book; 3. Lexical Stage with passages to help students enlarge their vocabulary and develop their competence in expressing with strings of sentences. Grammar, words and sentences are all taught and trained in context. The body of the textbook consists of six parts, namely text, new words, notes, grammar, pronunciation and exercises. The book contains 100 lessons and 3,300 new words in total.
Yang Jizhou, a professor in Beijing Language and Culture University, has been engaged in teaching and research on Chinese as a foreign language and in compilation of TCFL textbooks for a long time. His papers include “The Sequencing of Grammatical Items at the Elementary Stage of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language” and “Several Points in the Compilation of Elementary Chinese Textbooks”, and so on. He has published such textbooks and reference books as Program for the Elementary Stage of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, Chinese Course, Climbing- Intermediate Chinese Course, 1700 Pairs of Chinese Common Word Usages, etc.