Chinese

The Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures is pleased to announce its intensive program in Mandarin Chinese, offered through the Summer Language Institute (June 9 - August 8, 2008). The SLI program is an intensive, 8-credit, beginning-level program in Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese for students with no or little prior experience in the language. The program is not intended for students who speak Mandarin Chinese or who have previously studied the language. The program will cover material offered in Chinese 101 and 102 during the fall and spring semesters at the University of Virginia. Students may proceed to CHIN201 upon successful completion of the program.

Program Description

The Summer Language Institute Chinese program helps students acquire a solid foundation in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Students learn all the sounds and tones in Mandarin Chinese, basic vocabulary, frequently used characters, pinyin (the standard Mandarin Chinese transcription system), as well as information about Chinese language, culture, and society. An intimate class format maximizes interaction between teachers and students, creating a learning environment that facilitates both individual and collective learning processes.  The program focuses on cultivating students’ proficiency levels and aims at helping students acquire real life communication skills.  Students will learn to perform the following functions using complete sentences at the paragraph level:  descriptions, narrations, explanations, comparisons, and giving directions. They will also learn to handle a range of social cultural situations within the short span of time.  

Program Activities and Information

Core Coursework: During the 9-week program, the class will meet every weekday, 9 am- to 12 pm. The students are also required to spend 4-6 hours outside of class previewing and reviewing class materials. Students will gain additional practice with sounds, tones, vocabulary and dialogue sentences by listening to audio files either at home or in the school language lab. Students will also participate in individual tutorials for twenty minutes each week between 12 and 2 pm, Mondays through Wednesdays.   The purpose of these sessions is to give students an opportunity to fine tune their speaking and listening skills and to interact one-on-one with trained tutors.  Our tutors are Graduate students from UVa’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  All of them work as teaching assistants during the regular academic year.  

Cultural Activities: For one hour on Thursday evenings between 5 and 7pm, students are required to attend Chinese Corner, where native Chinese speakers and students of Chinese gather informally on the lawn to practice their conversation skills.  Organized cultural activities on Fridays, and occasionally on Saturdays, give students additional opportunities to interact with the local Chinese community.  Activities include short lectures by UVa professors or guest lecturers and discussions on topics relating to Chinese culture and local customs.  Attendance in all course activities is required of all students, regardless of whether they are enrolled for credit or non-credit. Every student, regardless of their type of enrollment, must earn a passing grade in each class in the first half of the SLI in order to participate in the second half of the program.

The Communicative Approach: The curriculum emphasizes linguistic aspects of language learning (pronunciation, vocabulary, and structure) as well as social-cultural strategies in communication. The experienced instructors employ communicative and collaborative approaches to foster rapid development of oral and written communication skills. Extracurricular activities involving segments of the local Chinese community expose students to Chinese culture, including language exchanges with native speakers of Chinese and visits to the classroom by native speakers of Chinese.

Functional based homework and quizzes are given on a daily basis. Review tests (both written and oral) are administered frequently to increase students' long term memory of material learned. Students will leave the course with the ability to talk about themselves, their family and friends, academic life, hobbies, sports, weather, and transportation. Students will also learn functional Chinese, suitable in a variety of settings, including restaurants, libraries, hospitals, airports, and post offices.

Student Centered Approach: It is not just the usefulness of Mandarin Chinese that makes it a good choice now that Chinese is rising on the world stage. Students will also discover how enjoyable and rewarding it is to be able to read and write Chinese characters and to learn the unique tones and sounds of Mandarin Chinese within a short span of time. This intensive, student-centered approach to learning Mandarin Chinese will allow students to acquire basic oral proficiency in Mandarin Chinese within less than a month. At the end of the program, students will be able to communicate in Chinese in complete sentences and paragraphs.
  
Textbooks: Textbooks: Integrated Chinese, Level 1, Part 1, 2 including Textbook, Workbook, and Character Workbook, all in Simplified Character Edition,
Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 2nd edition, 2005. Students are required to write with Simplified Characters.

Program Director: Shu-chen Chen earned her MA in linguistics from the University of Victoria and her PhD in Religious Studies (Buddhist Studies) from the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism, but her personal interests extend to books on spirituality and language pedagogy.  Learning Tibetan, Sanskrit and Japanese during the course of her doctoral program has influenced the way she teaches Chinese (her native language), showing her how beneficial it is for a language teacher to take on the role of a language student.  Shu-chen Chen finds teaching Chinese in the summer intensive setting most rewarding because she sees her students’ abilities increase quickly in a short period of time.  She also derives fulfillment from knowing that the SLI experience will prepare her students to excel in CHIN 201 and 202 should they continue with their Chinese studies during the regular academic year.
Shu-chen Chen also sees common ground between her research on religion and
spirituality and her teaching of Chinese. On the first day of Chinese 101, in the
Fall of 2007 she told her class: "Through learning Chinese, you get to know your
own culture better, you become more understanding, more accepting and you
learn that differences aren't so great after all. It's good for the harmony of the
world."

Student comments on the program:
“Very fun and relaxed learning environment- great overall.”

“Huge volume, short time frame. Extremely difficult, but that's summer session! Chen Laoshi worked as hard as we did. I truly appreciate her dedication to our learning.”

“Professor Chen is a wonderful teacher, and I believe that my development in Chinese will undoubtedly be much improved because of the basis she has given me.”

“Chen Laoshi is an amazingly effective teacher. She was not only fair, but kind- she would intentionally go out of her way to help you. She demanded a lot from us, but she always made it clear and stuck to her own guidelines as well. We always had a clear understanding of what exactly was expected from us and what we could rely on her for. One of the best professors I have ever had.”