TIMES - Newspaper Reading Course of Intermediate Chinese - Volume 1. ISBN: 7561916655, 7-5619-1665-5, 9787561916650, 978-7-5619-1665-0

Format: textbook, answer book with vocabulary index
English Title: TIMES - Newspaper Reading Course of Intermediate Chinese (Ⅰ)
Chinese Title: 时代：中级汉语报刊阅读教程（上册）- 课本、练习参考答案及英译生词表
ISBN-10: 7561916655, 7-5619-1665-5
ISBN-13: 9787561916650, 978-7-5619-1665-0
Binding: softcover
Pages: 235 (textbook), 63 (answer book)
Shipping Weight: 590g
Size: 186mm x 260mm
Language: simplified Chinese, English (vocabulary only)
Publisher: Beijing Language and Culture University Press (北京语言文化大学出版社)

TIMES - Newspaper Reading Course of Intermediate Chinese is a textbook of Chinese newspaper reading intended for international students who have studied in China for a year.

The textbook may be used for universities sophomores, intermediate refresher course, or short-term advanced Chinese program. Each lesson is completed in four class hours (45 minutes for each hour), and each volume is finished in one semester.

Selection of materials comes first in developing textbooks of newspaper reading. News selected for the textbook must be update. Today’s news may become outdated tomorrow, which is especially true for some emergent events. However, if the content of the news selected keeps up with the times and the events and figures reported are what people are concerned about, the materials will not become outdated in a relatively long period of time.

Different contents need to be expressed in different forms, which are called the styles. At present, newspaper news has been classified into three categories – news, newsletters and news commentaries, each of which can be further subdivided. Students are expected to understand the characteristics of the news in Chinese newspapers in terms of the style of writing through learning the lessons in this textbook.

The second problem is the degree of difficulty of the news selected. Relatively short pieces of news appropriate for intermediate students of Chinese are selected for this textbook. The news presented in Vol. I has about 600 to 1200 characters in each piece. However, the texts are arranged not according to their length, but according to quantity of the new words, difficulty of the content and familiarity of students with the material. After all, newspapers are natural texts, so the main problem for students in newspaper reading is vocabulary. We have made the following efforts to provide students with support in learning vocabulary:
(1) proper names are underlined when they appear in the text for the first time;
(2) explanations of idioms are provided after the text;
(3) notes are given to the names of important institutions relevant to the text and to current cultural phenomena; and
(4) new words are listed and annotated in Chinese in each lesson, and annotations of the words in English are given in the appendix. All these are helpful in lowering the difficulty in reading the news for students.

Times - Newspaper Reading Course of Intermediate Chinese consists of two volumes. Each volume has 4 units and is further divided into 15 lessons. A comprehensive review is designed for each unit. The lesson contains two parts – Text 1 and Text 2, which are relevant with or complement each other. Text 1 is mainly for intensive reading, while Text 2 is for extensive reading. For Text 1, background information about the topic, style of writing and text analysis are provided at the beginning, and notes and sentence patterns of the news are presented at the end in order to meet the needs of teaching. Upon the completion of the learning of Text 1 students are expected to understand the characteristics of the text, vocabulary, and sentence patterns of Chinese news and get familiar with those frequently used words and expressions on certain topics so as to master the fundamental knowledge and reading skills of Chinese newspapers. For Text 2, students are required to read the text with questions and without referring to the dictionary in order to improve their reading comprehension. A great number of exercises are provided for each lesson with more exercises for Text 1 than for Text 2. Exercises provided for the unit reviews can be used by the teacher as tests in class or by students as self-tests.