This course is aimed at students who have no previous knowledge of the Chinese language but wish to develop some basic skills of communication in Chinese, either for the purpose of career development or personal interest.
This module aims to provide students with a grounding in Mandarin Chinese, to enable them to communicate at a basic level in essential social and survival situations. Students will learn basic grammatical structures and characters to be applied in four skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening.

METHODS OF TEACHING: i) Weekly two-hour workshops taught by Tutors from the Cardiff University Confucius Institute
METHODS OF ASSESSMENT: i) Coursework (20%) 2 pieces of text production
ii) Oral continuous assessment (40%) iii) Aural class test (40%)

 Email: languages@cardiff.ac.uk

Knowledge and Understanding:     -     demonstrate their ability to comprehend very basic phrases in spoken form

              by taking part in role plays and similar learning tasks.

• demonstrate their ability to recognize around 80 Chinese characters and read simple sentences in written form.
• show their ability to use basic phrases and sentences by talking  about themselves, their family and everyday life.
• demonstrate a knowledge of basic grammatical structures, phrases and characters by completing writing tasks. 

Intellectual Skills    -    integrate information provided in taught sessions and private study

Discipline Specific (including practical) Skills:

• demonstrate their ability to understand simple instructions and respond appropriately in everyday situations
• demonstrate their ability to communicate in spoken and written form by using limited vocabulary and formulaic expressions

-      collect information from short texts in the target language

Students will actively participate in dialogues, group discussions and other interactive language exercises. The use of multi-media teaching facilities such as power-point presentations, CD playing and Internet learning resources will enhance students’ active language learning.

24 contact hours – interactive language work-shops.

to be responsive to the discipline of working with others as part of a group

to understand and reflect upon different cultures and societies

 Written class test (40%) and course work (20%): to test students’ ability to  understand simple texts, produce written responses and translate simple sentences.

 Oral continuous assessment (20%): to test students’ ability to produce oral dialogues in Chinese

Aural class test (20%) to test students’ comprehension of spoken Mandarin on familiar day- to- day topics

Apart from the above, this course also covers some basic knowledge about the Chinese language:

1. Pin yin (the Chinese phonetic transcription system)
2. Tones and tone changes
3. Chinese characters (basic strokes, rules of stroke order and radicals)
4. A basic contrastive study of  Chinese and English grammar