No one could claim that learning Chinese is easy. Discover China recognises the challenges that face students of the Chinese language and applies teaching and learning approaches to make tearning effective, meaningful and enjoyable.
Discover China is a four-level Mandarin Chinese course, specially designed for beginners to intermediate students and employs a communicative approach to tearning Chinese. Emphasis is placed on pair work. group work and an a wide variety of speaking and listening activities to help students become confident Chinese language speakers.
A communicative approach lets students learn by using the language in real-life situations, providing them with the tools they need to communicate in Chinese naturally.
Language in context presents key vocabulary and language points in situations where students will encounter them in real life.
Structured. effective learning design based on the sequence "presentation, practice and production" features activities moving from controlled practice to personalised tasks, which facilitates effective learning of the language.
Inductive grammar teaching encourages students to discover the language rules of Chinese for themselves by identifying the patterns in targeted language samples,
Systematic vocabulary and grammar development comes through topic-based practice and extension exercises .The lexical syllabus is based on levels 1 -4 of the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi(HSK test) and the grammatical syllabus takes students up to the Vantage level (level B2) of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
Free online resources including Teacher's Books, assessment tasks, unit quizzes and extra character writing sheets allow both teacher-guided learning in the classroom and self-teaching at a pace suited to the individual student.