User's Guide

This textbook was created based on the standards of the Oral Proficiency Interview held by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The debate topics of each lesson trains students in advanced language tasks such as giving thorough descriptions and narrations, comparing abstract concepts, and establishing hypotheses. The lesson plans in this textbook will train students in dialectical thinking and give them opportunities to improve their ability to summarize, make inferences, and contrast hypotheses.

The textbook contains eight chapters (with two lessons each) and is organized to help students gradually become more competent in effectively expressing and defending themselves in debate activities. Teachers will be able to use the structure of the lesson plans in this textbook to assist them in designing assessments for students.

· 辩论准备1 (Debate preparation 1) includes materials to help students practice listening skill. After viewing a video clip, students will have a chance to answer questions about its content in general and in detail. Alternatively, some questions are fill-in-the-blank style and require students to fill in key vocabulary from the video. The vocabulary list given before the questions aims to aid students through the task.

· 辩论准备2 (Debate preparation 2) contains lesson-specific vocabulary, which give the characters, pinyin, and definitions as used in the video clip (alternate meanings of some words may not be listed if they are deemed irrelevant in the given context).

A. At the end of each vocabulary list appears a few collocations made up of the words and commonly used/heard expressions in the list. This is designed to prepare students to hear these phrases when listening to the video clip. Isolating key terms from the report and asking students to make connections are a useful way of helping them focus on the sentence structure and vocabulary words in the video clip.

B. 句型结构/词汇练习 (Sentence structure/vocabulary practice) lists some of the patterns found in the video clips at the end of each lesson. It provides numerous examples of each sentence pattern and allows you to orally practice creating your own sentences or translations using the vocabulary words and sentence patterns in each unit.

· 辩论准备 3 (Debate preparation 3) is designed to give students a chance to discuss thought-provoking ideas, allowing you to think about the issues for yourselves, or ask each other questions about the issues presented in the report. It also helps them use and expand on what they have just listened to and prepare for the debate questions.

· The appendix includes debate tactics, debate procedures, and formats. It is very useful for students to get familiar with different linguistic and rhetoric tactics to be more effective in stating their opinions, making rebuttals, and defending their standpoints. The debate procedures and formats can be adapted to different settings and curriculums.

Our companion website (advancedchinese.byu.edu) includes video clips for each chapter, more listening practice questions, authentic listening materials, and various teacher resources.