The Appreciation: Advanced Chinese selects appropriate texts on various topics that students are interested in. This course book contains 32 lessons in 8 units. It corresponds with the "Reading Writing" book at the same level and plays a complementary role. This book does not focus on language points, but tends to lead students to carry out communicative tasks and express their opinions on the selected topics. In general, the vocabulary does not go beyond the corresponding "Reading- Writing" book, in order to stress students' listening and speaking practice. Regarding the selection of topics, this book covers family and marriage, daily life, leisure and entertainment, human relationship, personal experience, character and cultivation, social issues, culture and history, etc.
The specific teaching advice is as follows:
(1) It takes about 90 minutes to study one Lesson.
(2) Listening and speaking should be integrated into the teaching process. For each Lesson, it is better to begin with "lead-in activities" and the given listening materials. The teacher may select one material from the two and decide to use it either before or in the process of studying the text.
(3) The teacher should allocate proper amount of time for vocabulary teaching. It is suggested neither to spend too much time explaining the new words, nor to ignore them completely.
(4) The discussion activities on the given topics are the key part of every class. In each lesson, every dialogue is followed by some questions to check students' comprehension and to guide their discussion.
(5) The exercises in each lesson consist of four parts. Exercises 1-4 are designed for listening comprehension and preliminary discussion. Exercise 5, the key part, is designed for free discussion after studying the text. A number of relevant topics are provided in this part and the teacher may use them selectively according to students' needs and interests. Exercise 6 is designed for role-play or debate, and students are required to put their language into proper contexts. Exercise 7 is communicative tasks that can be assigned as homework and class report for the following class.