Overview

Modern Chinese for Heritage Beginners aims to serve as a stepping-stone for Chinese heritage language learners’ future Chinese learning, inspiring them to reflect on their identities, learn Chinese American history, and embrace their cultural heritage. The book starts with talking about individuals and families and then expands to the Chinese and Asian American communities in the U.S. and eventually to the entire American society, all from the unique perspective of Chinese American students. Taking a macro approach that builds learners’ literacy skills on their initial abilities in speaking and listening, each lesson starts with listening and speaking activities and then moves to reading and writing. The content complexity and language difficulty are balanced to present rich content that matches students’ critical thinking abilities in a language appropriate for their literacy level. Lively and humorous language makes the book a joy to read. Each lesson has a conversation and an essay to expose students to informal and formal registers. Moreover, authentic tasks are designed to facilitate students’ language output, following the three modes of communication promoted by the American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational. This theme-based Chinese textbook is written for high school and college-level Chinese heritage language learners.

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9781032399775

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Yan Liu is Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Her recent research focuses on Chinese language pedagogies and interdisciplinary curriculum development. Currently, she serves as a board member of CLTA (2022–2025) and co-chairs two CLTA SIG groups: Content-based Chinese Language Courses at Advanced Levels and Chinese Heritage Language Learning. Jingjing Ji is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. Before joining Northwestern, she worked at Washington and Lee University and the University of Virginia. She also worked at intensive summer programs such as Middlebury College summer school. Her publications on Chinese heritage language education have appeared in various peer-reviewed academic journals. Grace Wu is Senior Lecturer in Foreign Languages in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been in charge of the heritage track of Chinese courses at Penn since 1994. She published a series of Chinese Biographies with Cheng and Tsui and is Chair of the ACTFL Heritage Language SIG (2022–2024). Min-Min Liang is Lecturer in Chinese at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has developed three Chinese learning websites: Teaching Chinese Writing, Chinese Contemporary Writers, and Puzzles for Reading and Writing, and co-authored a Chinese textbook titled Modern Readers with Performance-based Tasks and an online reader, iChineseReader. She is Vice Chair of the ACTFL Heritage Languages SIG (2022–2024).

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