Author Description

A unique effort in the CHINESE LEARNING SERIES is the strong push on developing student's reading comprehension in Chinese, although high quality education on other skills are also provided in high standard, e.g. verbal communication and writing. Reading comprehension is known as one of the most challenging bottlenecks in Chinese education as a second language. The best practices to be incorporated in our program are based on 1) modern second language education theories; 2) maximum language input; and 3) student centric curriculum, instruction and assessment. CHINESE LEARNING SERIES adopts a "maximum acquisition" methodology, which is designed based on Stephen Krashen's "Input Hypothesis," pedagogy and educational psychology. Basically, CHINESE LEARNING SERIES students acquire Chinese in a natural order by receiving comprehensible and constructional verse input from classical poems. Multimedia tools are incorporated in CHINESE LEARNING SERIES, e.g. pictures, animation, software and character cards that help students memorize and reflect the Chinese characters that they learnt. Students maximize their language input utilizing poems, animation, games and other effective and interactive means in classroom and at home. Students learn while "playing." CHINESE LEARNING SERIES teaching and practice materials are easy to follow and fun to use. It has been proven highly effective to have young children reading and reciting famous poems during the past two years. It helps to develop and establish student's Chinese language sense. "Recitation" not only overcomes the learner's anxiety of "foreign language," but also turns tacit knowledge into explicit language. The repetition rate in CHINESE LEARNING SERIES is determined based on the laws of forgetting rate in human, e.g. the contents need to be repeated 6 times at different time points to ensure the students memorizing what they learned. Exercises and reviews after school are weighed equally important as what they learned in c