The Use of Extensive and Intensive Reading and Comprehension Materials in Secondary School Chinese Language Teaching

 

Xie Qian (谢芊), Confucius Institute at University of Rhode Island

 Xie Jia (谢稼), Barrington High School, Rhode Island

----as a method to enhance students overall Chinese language proficiency in cultural context.

 

This paper is going to talk about the use of reading and comprehension materials in addition to textbook materials. Normally, textbooks provide dialogues and narration of the dialogues as texts. Despite the provided exercises and drills, the variety of repetition is limited. Just like games and activities are added by teachers, reading materials can also be added to teaching process because despite speaking and listening, students should also develop their ability in recognizing Chinese characters in different context, understand Chinese language in different forms and self-learning. The daily based schedule of secondary schools provides the advantage to do intensive work in and outside class. This paper is going to introduce the real teaching experience of using extensive and intensive reading materials for students from lower to advanced levels. Instead of picking up anything available, the materials are selected and tailored based  to meet specific teaching goals based textbook content, culture content, students’ ability, time management and etc.  With careful and considerable planning, the use of extensive and intensive reading should provide challenge and variety to existing textbooks to enhance the overall performance.