Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

1. Apply wider cultural understandings and recognize Chinese cultural values to interact with native Chinese people and authentic texts
2. Employ the understanding of Chinese syntactic system to form arguments, comments, explanations, agreements and disagreements
3. Use acquired Chinese grammatical structures and vocabulary to require information in more authentic settings
4. Use effective communicative skills to interact with native Mandarin Chinese speakers

1. Group, pair and individual activities – communicative based activities
2. Classroom and individual projects – project-based activities
3. Individual and group presentations – project-based activities
4. Class drills – TPR and TPRS teaching methods; immersion approach
 

1. Active participation in interactive class activities, including individual, pair or group activities
2. Individual presentations
3. Contextual written tasks to assess reading, writing, cultural and aural competencies
4. Oral interviews with partners or instructor
5. Multimedia aids to improve listening skills, including short audio clips or films
6. Class discussions to enhance cultural awareness and knowledge

Themes:
   1. Describe personality
   2. Conversation strategies
   3. Describe spending patterns
   4. Education systems
   5. Basic Chinese geography
Concepts:
Presenting:
   1. Agreements and disagreements
   2. Comments
   3. Preferences and criteria
   4. Rhetorical questions
   5. Arguments
Skills and competencies:
   1. State different situations
   2. Reduce potential tension in a conversation by changing topics
   3. Discuss the pros and the cons of different activities
   4. Make budget
   5. Indicate agreement or disagreement
   6. Present opinions
   7. Locate major Chinese cities, provinces and rivers on the map
   8. Give a brief introduction to geographic features of China
   9. Compare some basic geographic aspects of China and the United States