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, advertisements, songs, etc. Using abundant online video resources, it builds a natural-language-based classroom teaching environment, giving full play to the Chinese audiovisual-speaking course's function of being a window to the society, and promoting the integration of language learning and cultural understanding.

 

This set of materials is divided into six levels, each of which is composed of several themes, encompassing society, economy, culture, education, life, love, and art. Several course modules are designed under each theme. The intermediate level (Ⅱ) includes 10 volumes, each taking four class hours and covering the communication functions and scenes commonly used in the elementary level, intermediate level and advanced level. Teachers can develop a personalized assortment of teaching materials based on the themes they are interested in, which can either be independently used in an audiovisual-speaking course, or as exercise materials in a comprehensive class, speaking class, listening class and other classes.

 

The titles of the intermediate level (Ⅱ) include Cartoons, Culture, Variety Shows, Travel, Celebrities, Arts, Vocation, Family, Business, and Society. 

Wang Tao, a teacher of Beijing International Studies University, is devoted to studying Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, and focuses his research areas on Chinese language processing and computer-based studies. He participated in the design and development of Jinshan Typing software and assumed the chief responsibility of constructing the TCFL digital resources database of Beijing International Studies University and other scientific programs organized by MOE and Beijing City. He wrote a textbook entitled The Basic Computer-Based Chinese Language Applications for International Students and published a number of papers. Besides these, he won the champion in the 6th Contest of Young Teachers of Beijing International Studies University and got the first prize in the 2nd Multimedia Education Software Contest of Beijing.

Each lesson takes about 4 class hours. 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”.