In the United States, Chinese as a world language in the K-12 classroom is an emerging, fast-growing and ever-changing phenomenon. Students of Chinese language are a very diverse population with regard to age, grade levels, needs, language backgrounds and learning styles. Instructional conditions vary in terms of class size, contact hours, intensity of instruction and the availability of equipment and materials, etc. Professional development for teacher preparation and training is inadequate. This book is designed to facilitate true teaching. It aims at reflecting and encouraging a break from traditional practice by combining language materials, teaching references, and instructional design into a single series for easy, quick and solid practical use. This book endeavors to face two essential questions for a teacher of K-12 world language: What do I teach in a K-12 world language classroom? How do I teach in a K-12 would language classroom? Volume I centers on “What” and provides a series of building blocks, each of which is structured with a topic and connects functional language use with linguistic structures. Grammatical patterns are grouped according to functional use, and vocabulary is ordered by category and topic. The author believes that learners can discover a new world through studying a world language and discover their own strength in learning. And she "expects young learners of Chinese to become world citizens and lifelong learners". The book has two editions in traditional and simplified Chinese. This one is the traditional Chinese edition.
Haiyan Fu has a Master's Degree in education from Smith College, and an Ed. D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, specializing in second language acquisition, instructional leadership and curriculum development. She is certified in Chinese, English, ESL, Language Arts and Bilingual Education in the State Of Illinois.
Fu has been teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages at postsecondary institutions since 1982 and teaching high school for the last eight years. She is currently teaching all levels of Mandarin Chinese at Northside College Preparatory High School in Chicago. In 2003, she was selected to appear in the Annenburg Foundation production "Teaching Foreign Languages K-12: Putting the Standards to Practice". Fu is a trainer in the U.S. Department of Education’s Teacher-to-Teacher Training Corp; a writer for Chicago Public Schools’ Project MAJIC, a U.S. Department of Education-funded effort to develop K-12 curricula for Chinese and Japanese; an AP Chinese textbook reviewer for the College Board, and has been president of the Midwest Chinese Teachers Alliance since 2000. In 2006 was elected as a board member of Chinese Language Association of Secondary-Elementary Schools.