This course is aimed at students who have built up a working vocabulary of Chinese and have had some knowledge of the language but wish to further develop their communication skills in oral, aural and written form.
This is an advanced course designed for those who have learned Chinese for more than 2 years part-time with a working vocabulary of around 600 words. More intensive language skill training will be provided, particularly in productive skills of speaking and writing, to enable students further develop their language competence.

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

Email: languages@cardiff.ac.uk

Knowledge and Understanding:    

• comprehend language material with a clearly expressed content which is likely to encounter on a general social occasion or in a work or study situation;
• note down important information that one hears or reads;
• describe, explain or narrative one’s personal experiences or topics of a general nature in basically well-formed sentences with a certain degree of coherence;
• make sentences in a skilled manner and write texts of some length on common topics in everyday life in accordance with certain format.

Intellectual Skills        use effective cognitive strategies, e.g. inference, induction, deduction, gist-  

                                                                grasping for understanding language material;

                                          integrate information provided in taught sessions and private study.

 Discipline Specific (including practical) Skills:

• be skilled with the Chinese phonetic system, and able to pronounce Chinese characters with basically correct tones, as well as to use tonal modifications correctly in daily conversations;
• have a command of 800 Chinese words of high frequency; 
• communicate appropriately in the field of study, work and social intercourse

 Students will actively participate in pair-work, dialogues, group discussions and other interactive language exercises. Multi-media teaching facilities such as power-point presentations and CD playing will be used to enhance students’ active language learning.

48 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.

Coursework (20%) and Written class test (20%) to test students’ ability of comprehending texts and producing responses in writing, and their ability of doing simple translations.

Oral assessment (40%) to test students’ ability of producing coherent discourse in Chinese

Aural class test (20%) to test students’ ability of comprehending language materials of general nature.

The main language functions covered in this course are:

1. Socializing: gratitude, congratulations and compliments  
2. Showing likes and dislikes: recreations and pastimes
3. Expressing personal opinions: commenting on films and novels   
4. Making suggestions: shopping and comparing prices
5. Describing past experiences
6. Talking about one’s career
7. Travelling: booking tickets and hotels
8. Sight-seeing  
9. Making suppositions: plans and wishes
10. Comparing and contrasting: schools in China
11. Taking notes: listening to broadcast
12.  Writing emails 

The main grammatical points covered in this course are:

1. The usage of common adverbials for the notion of time
2. The usage of the auxiliary  ‘过’；
3. The usage of complements of time and action;
4. The sentence pattern of “ 是……   的”;
5. Basic comparisons
6. The structural rules of Chinese characters