This course aims to improve your overall language skills. It will enhance your reading skills by familiarizing you with the different language "markers" in the modern Chinese language, commonly used sentence structures and idiomatic phrases. Some reading texts are explained, as examples, in class, others will be assigned for extensive reading in or after class.

Following the reading activities in class, discussions will be conducted on the content and other related social issues of the reading materials. The course relies on learning tasks/projects to achieve the learning objective. Writing assignments will be based on the readings; you may be asked to summarize, analyze, reflect, and comment on the reading texts or supplementary materials.

Prerequisite for entering this course is at least two years of solid recent studies of college -level Chinese; the ability to understand and participate in questions and answers of everyday situations; the ability to read and understand sentences and short paragraphs, the ability to write sentences and short paragraphs on simple topics; knowledge of basic sentence structures, the ability to read and write approximately 1,000 most commonly used Chinese characters. Placement is determined by students' performance on the placement test administered before classes begin. Your language proficiency level, not the length of your previous studies, is the key factor in placement.