integrated chinese 3r howdy

7/25/2019 Integrated Chinese 3r Howdy

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Integrated Chinese. Third Edition. Level 1, Part 1 and Part 2. Yuehua Liu, Tao-chungYao, Nyan-Ping Bi, Liangyan Ge, and Yaohua Shi. Boston: Cheng and Tsui 2009.

1. Introduction

Integrated Chinese (hereafter IC) is one of the most popular textbooks in Chinese

language courses. The third edition has made several long-awaited and welcomedchanges. After using it at our university for one academic year, we feel that it is necessary

to compliment on its improvements and offer some suggestions as well.

This review is organized into the following sections. We will first introduce theorganization of the textbook and some of its new features in section 2. Following that, we

will offer several comments on the textbook in the order of vocabulary, phoneticsinstruction, grammar instruction, and discourse/pragmatics instruction in section 3, 4, 5,

and 6. The final section shall conclude this review.

2. Structural Organization of the Textbooks

In this section, we address some new features of IC. The 3rd edition, compared to the 2nd

edition, made several changes and improvements. First, it reduces the number of lessonsfrom twenty-three chapters to twenty, which is more manageable for an academic year’s

curriculum. Some universities have difficulties covering all twenty-three lessons into aone year course design, which might lead to dissatisfaction for some students. By using

the 3rd edition, we were able to adequately cover all twenty lessons within one academic

year, and the students also managed to follow the pace very well.

Table 1. Comparison of the 3rd and 2nd Edition

IC, 3rd

Edition IC, 2nd

Edition

1. Greetings

2. Family

3. Dates & Time

4. Hobbies

5. Visiting Friends

6. Making

Appointments

7. Studying Chinese

8. School Life

9. Shopping

10. Transportation

11. Talking About the

Weather

12. Dining

13. Asking Directions

14. Birthday Party

15. Seeing a Doctor

16. Dating

17. Renting an

Apartment

18. Sports

19. Travel

20. At the Airport

1. Greetings

2. Family

3. Dates and Time

4. Hobbies

5. Visiting Friends

6. Making

Appointments

7. Studying Chinese

8. School Life

9. Shopping

10. Talking About the

Weather

11. Transportation

12. Dining

13. At the Library

14. Asking

Directions

15. Birthday Party

16. Seeing a Doctor

17. Dating

18. Renting an

Apartment

19. At the Post

Office

20. Sports

21. Travel

22. Hometown

23. At the Airport



Table 1 compares the different chapters between the 3rd edition and the 2nd edition.

Lesson 13, 19, and 22, shown in bold face, were removed from the 2nd edition in the 3rd

edition. However, most of the grammar points in these three lessons are incorporated intoother lessons in the 3rd edition such that there is no compromise on content.

As its Chinese title suggests, the design of IC encompass all four language skills oflistening, speaking, reading and writing. Its English title also reveals another important

aspect of how IC is being structured, that of being ‘integrated’. By this, IC means toadopt a pedagogy which aims to helps students understand how the Chinese language

works through demonstrations of how to use Chinese in real life. For example, in level 1of the textbook, IC covers a wide-variety of essential topics such as greetings, dates and

time, making appointments, shopping, transportation, dining, asking directions, andrenting an apartment, mostly topics that orients towards student life. This pedagogy of

integrating language learning into authentic dialogues of everyday situations is followedthrough in the 3rd edition, with further emphasis on the specification of discourse on

language learning. The overall structure of a lesson is shown in Table 2, with comparison between the 3rd and 2nd editions.

Table 2. Structure of a Lesson in the 3rd and 2nd editions

IC, 3rd

Edition IC, 2nd

Edition

Learning Objectives

Relate and Get Ready

Dialogue 1

Vocabulary

GrammarLanguage Practice

Dialogue 2

Vocabulary

Grammar

Language Practice

How About You?

Culture Highlights

English Texts

Progress Checklist

Vocabulary

Dialogue 1

Vocabulary

Dialogue 2

GrammarPattern Drills

English Texts

The 3rd edition has added several new features such as “Learning Objectives”, “Relateand Get Ready”, “Language Practice”, “How About You?” and “Progress Checklist”. At

the beginning of each lesson, the “learning objectives” listed help students gain a clearer

understanding of their goals after learning the lesson, facilitating adequate preparationsfor new tasks and help focus their studies. The following example is taken from Lesson 1.



!

!"#$%&%' )*+",-&."/

!" $%&' ()''*"+ ,*- .&(( ()/0" $* -') 1%&")') $*

"

234%/"5) 6/'&4 50))$&"5'7

" 8)9-)'$ / :)0'*";' (/'$ "/<) /"= >-(( "/<) /"= :0*?&=) ,*-0 *."7

"

@)$)0<&") .%)$%)0 '*<)*") &' / $)/4%)0 *0 / '$-=)"$7

"

A'4)0$/&" '*<)*");' "/$&*"/(&$,B

The “Relate and Get Ready” section also helps facilitate contextual understanding. As we

all know, language and culture cannot be separated when studying a new language. This part following “Learning Objectives”, as well as the “Culture Highlights” portion, helps

students compare their native language and culture with that of Chinese, highlightingsimilarities or differences between them. The following is an example of “Related andGet Ready”.

!

$"!#-" #%0 '"- $"#01

!" ,*-0 *." 4-($-0)C4*<<-"&$,D

EB F*. =* :)*:() 50))$ )/4% *$%)0 .%)" <))$&"5 >*0 $%) >&0'$ $&<)G

HB @* :)*:() '/, $%)&0 5&?)" "/<) *0 >/<&(, "/<) >&0'$G

IB F*. =* /49-/&"$/"4)' *0 4(*') >0&)"=' /==0)'' )/4% *$%)0G

In general, thematic organization of essential dialogues in practical usages is well

developed, allowing students to connect language usage with certain discourse situations.However, in consideration of more difficult structures or vocabulary, certain fundamental

expressions are delayed till late in the text, for example, /,

which is a regular formulaic expression during greeting sequences but not introduced in

Lesson 1. Nevertheless, we feel that such a balance could also be achieved if suchfundamental expressions were introduced earlier without too much explication on itscomplex structures. Analogous expression in English could also be invoked as

comparison to prevent confusion.

Additionally, the “Pattern Drills” in the 2nd edition is replaced by “Language Practice” inthe 3rd edition. We think that the addition of “Language Practice” is one of the bestfeatures in the 3rd edition. The students get the chance to produce utterance directly from

the concept or situation depicted by the colorful pictures or cartoons. At the same time,we feel that “Pattern Drills” should be maintained as well, as they provide good repetitive

practices that sediments understanding of constructions. Another change in the structure

of a lesson is that the explications of grammar points are separated into two partsmatching the two dialogues within a lesson. That is, the grammar points pertaining to thedialogue 1 and 2 follow dialogue 1 and 2 respectively. This is a welcomed change

because teachers and students do not have to go back and forth in the textbook as was



done in the previous editions. Also, this makes it easier to design a course plan.

3. Vocabulary

In this section, we review the vocabulary component of the textbook. Compared with the

2nd edition, in which there are too many new words per dialogue, the amount of newwords are reduced in the 3rd edition. Thus, students do not have to deal with too many

new words or characters per unit of learning. However, in some lessons, the distributionof new vocabulary is disproportionally uneven. For example, there are 29 new words in

part 1 of lesson 6, but only 12 new words in part 2 of the same lesson. We understandthat evenly distributing the vocabulary in each dialogue is a difficult task; however, if this

change can be achieved in future editions, it will be easier for teachers to manage classtime, design their class accordingly, and also for students to learn vocabulary in a more

consistent manner and pace. We suggest that such amendments be extended togrammatical points as well, which we will return when we discuss the grammar

component.

Low-frequency characters are now indicated in the vocabulary list as grey-shadedcharacters. We would like to posit a question on the necessity of this as a point of

discussion, of whether indication of low-frequency characters is really necessary. From ateaching perspective, this gives uncommitted students an excuse to avoid practice

writing, or even attempting to learn the new characters. Furthermore, even though thetextbook has attempted to focus on high frequency words, the accuracy of this attempt

may be questionable. This frequency is based on the Hanyu Pinlu Dacidian

(). This is an interesting idea, however, this dictionary was publishedalmost 20 years ago. Indeed, sometimes the shaded gray characters are not really low

frequency in everyday talk. The characters, /, /, , , , and /,

are such examples. Based on Xiao et al. (2009), the lexicon / is ranked 635 and

/ is ranked 920 out of 5004 lexical items. Therefore, it is doubtful that the

character / is a low frequency character. Word frequencies asides, we may want to

consider if the discourse situations beginning learners frequently encounter calls for theuse of these characters. Students who travel to Chinese communities will get to have a lot

of chances to encounter the character of /, /, and as

they need to have coffee, ask for or look for telephone numbers, or even go to see a

doctor in case of a health emergency. These characters might also be the most frequentwords on the billboards in the streets. For example, Starbucks and local chain cafes areeverywhere in the city. In brief, while the indication of low-frequency characters is an

interesting idea, we are not sure whether (i) the choice is justified and (ii) if it is helpfulfrom the viewpoint of learning Chinese.



There are also several character issues, especially with the traditional character version of

the textbook. Since students who choose to learn traditional characters have tight

relations to Taiwan and Hong Kong, the traditional characters should follow theconvention of these speech communities. Therefore, the font for ME in the Character

Workbook should be not . Specifically, the lower part is not . is also

wrongly printed in the traditional character version of the textbook on page 112 and page

153. We understand that this is probably just a font problem caused by the software used. Nevertheless, it creates problems for students and should be amended.

One of the best new features in the 3rd edition of IC is that it is colorful. The textbook

can take more advantage of this feature by representing tones in different colors, whichwill definitely aid the students’ mastery of tones. There is in fact published work using

this approach (Dummitt 2008). We suggest that the new edition make use of this practiceand print the characters with different tones in different colors. For example, in the

vocabulary section, characters carrying the first tone could be printed in red, and threeother tones with three different colors respectively. We believe this will be a great feature

that will make the next edition of Integrated Chinese standout among other textbooks.

4. Phonetics Instruction

It is useful for students to have both pinyin and characters in a pedagogy that emphasizes

all four language skills. Pinyin texts accompanying Chinese characters throughout, allowstudents to focus on both speaking and pronunciation, and character recognition.

Although some students are likely to complain that the pinyin, character and Englishversions of the dialogues not appearing together would result in a more challenging

recitation, but we advocate for this organization as it compel students to commit thesounds of each character to memory. In order to improve the students’ literacy of

characters, the pinyin texts could even be moved back to be together with the Englishtranslation of the dialogues.

A consonant chart is also a very useful tool for teaching pronunciation of Chinese

syllabus at the beginner’s level. It presents concrete idea and helps illustrates the mannerand place of articulation. We have two suggestions with regards to the use of the

consonant chart in the 3rd edition of IC. The consonant chart on page 5 can be more

helpful for both teachers and students if the following changes are made. First, it shoulddefine terms such as labials, alveolars, stops, unaspirated, and so on. Without furtherexplanation of these terms, we doubt that this chart means anything to students. Of

course, teachers with phonetics background would have no problem explaining theseterms and applying them to teaching the sounds, but it is hard for students when they



review if the terms are not defined. Furthermore, the consonant chart on page 5 hasseveral mistakes that are probably a result of careless proofreading, as there is no such

problem in the previous editions. Table 1 is the consonant chart on page 5 of the

textbook. We have bracketed the sounds that are wrongly placed in the chart.

A Reference Chart for Initials

UNASPIRATED

STOPS

ASPIRATED

STOPS NASALS FRICATIVES

VOICED

CONTINUANTS

Labialsb p m f w*

Alveolarsd t n l

Dental sibilantsz c s

Retroflexeszh ch sh r

Palatals j q x y*

Velarsg k h

As we can see, the sound represented by the initials in the pinyin system such as s, sh, x,h, l, r, and y are printed in the wrong places. For example, the sounds represented by

pinyin symbol s, sh, x, and h are not nasals; l, r and y are not fricatives; also, zh, ch, and qare not stops. We believe that this wrongly printed phonetic chart would confuse Chinese

teachers who have no phonetics background and mislead students who have never taken alinguistics course. It would be the best if a correct chart can be posted on the publisher’s

website, and corrections made in the next edition of IC.

The following consonant chart is modified from Lin (2007) for the purpose ofcomparison. The original chart is represented in IPA symbols. We replace them with pinyin for the convenience of our readers. This chart basically follows the International

Phonetic Alphabet convention in the sense that it lists the place of articulation in the toprow and the manner of articulation in the right-most column.

bilabial labio-

dental

dental post-

alveolar

alveolo-

palatal

palatal velar

stop b p d t k g

fricative f s sh x

affricative z c j q

nasal m n ng(central)

approximant

w r w

lateral(approximant)

l



To compare with the consonant chart we quoted with the one in the textbook, one can

also observe that the phonetic chart in IC does not follow the convention used in IPA. We

hope that the consonant chart in the fourth edition can be corrected to follow the IPAconvention, so that it is easier for both teachers and students to read, especially those withlinguistics background.

We also believe that it is very useful for phonetic terms to be defined, and illustrations of

the vocal tract or articulator mechanisms provided. Based on our teaching experience,students think that the illustrations of articulators are very helpful. The notion of place of

articulation and manner of articulation is in fact a very good tool for students to learn thesound inventory of Chinese. It will give students a concrete picture on how to pronounce

certain sounds by putting their tongues in the correct positions in the vocal tract. Wesuggest the textbook provide diagrams of articulation like the one in Figure 1, taken from

Lin 2007.

A diagram here.

5. Grammar Instructions

Many learners of Chinese as a foreign language do not begin with future academic goals

in mind, and will probably never become linguists of the language. Therefore, it makessense for IC not to be too laden with linguistic jargons lest it confuses the students and

impedes progress more than it facilitates learning. However, from our experience, it is

still critical for adult students learning a foreign language to receive some basicinstruction on certain grammatical notions, especially those that are alien to the learner’snative language. In trying to come to terms with obscure linguistic practices, non-native

learners naturally return to their native language to look for analogous components as a basis for understanding. When such an analogous component is available and accurately

corresponds to the Chinese equivalent, it often acts to promote easy understanding andusage of the Chinese counterpart even without much instruction. However, when

equivalent practices are not available, and the grammatical instructions given are lessthan adequate, we find that students struggle and end up recurrently frustrated by their

lack of understanding. IC has been highly successful in this balancing act between providing adequate grammatical instructions while not burdening the students with

unnecessary linguistic nomenclature. The highlight of each pertinent grammatical usagein red, with detailed explanations and examples provided at the end of a dialogue also

serves as an excellent resource. Nevertheless we find that the textbook has adopted anegalitarian approach towards all types of grammatical components with no evident focus

on more difficult concepts. We submit for consideration a clearer division of focal versus



non-focal grammatical instructions based on student-centered needs. Some criticalgrammatical concepts seem to have received less than adequate treatment in the textbook.

We shall provide two examples of this. That is, the grammar points of LE () and

resultative complement construction.

First, the usage of LE () has notoriously been an extremely challenging notion for

foreign students. In IC, LE is introduced in Chapter 5 as a “dynamic particle” with alaundry list of descriptions of its core meaning as “completion of an action or event, or

the emergence of a situation”, and that it “should not be taken as an equivalent to the pasttense” (pp. 137). LE continues to be distributionally explicated in Chapter 8 and Chapter

11 as “usually appearing at the end of a series (of verb phrases)” (pp.208) and “indicateschange of status or the realization of a new situation” (pp.8) respectively. However, our

experience is that distributed examples without a single coherent module for such adifficult grammatical notion often serves to confuse the learner more than to enlighten

them.

Second, the unique resultative complement construction (/) in

Chinese is introduced in Chapter 12 simply by saying “following a verb, an adjective oranother verb can be used to denote the result of the action” (pp. 42). However, the

examples given are restricted to a few regular resultative complements such as “”,

“” and “”. Then in Chapter 13, more lexicons used in the resultative complement

position are given, but without an initial clear explication that this is a highly productiveand recurring grammatical structure not found in English. Without such guidance,

learners are left with an impression that these are ad-hoc occurrences with limited

characters such as “”, “” and “”.

Also, the textbook introduces 25 instances of resultative VV compounds without providing example sentences or contexts. It is hard for students to learn the sentence

patterns associated with these compounds without examples. We would suggest that atleast one sentence for each instance of the compounds be provided in the textbook. This

is important because the acquisition of the use of resultative compounds lays the

foundation for the learning of other constructions, such as the BA () construction.

A similar problem can also be found in the grammar point of using HAO “” and

NAN “/V” as adverbials. On page 232, Part 2, it lists several examples of “”

and “/V” such as , /, /, /, , /,

, /, , /, , /, , /, /,

/ . However, no examples of sentences were provided. It would be better if

these examples were also illustrated with sentences.



As mentioned before in the vocabulary section, we feel that most of these unintendeddeficiencies could be resolved with the specially designed vocabulary drills found in the

2nd edition, but strangely dropped in the 3rd edition. The vocabulary drills not only

provides excellent speaking practice but also allows the students to understand theflexible usages of a common particle or construction.

In addition to the problem of lack of sentence examples, we would also like to expresstwo other concerns about the grammar part of the textbook. The first is with explanations

and inaccurate sentence examples. The second concerns the naming of lexical categories.

We will discuss the textbook’s explanation of GANG /, GANGCAI / and

BA ; as well as the naming of the syntactic categories of GANG /, GANGCAI

/, ZENME / and ZAI .

There are certain explanations of grammar points that we find inadequate. We will give afew examples here. On page 41, the textbook states that “/ can be followed by an

expression that indicates the duration of time”. And then it gives the two examples to

illustrate their explanation.

(1)/

(2)*/*

This pair of sentences implies that / cannot be followed by durational phrases.

However this is misleading. For example, (3) is a grammatical sentence.

(3)/

The reason that (2) is ungrammatical is because the verb “leave” is an achievement

verb, and not because / cannot co-occur with a durational phrase. In contrast,

the verb in (3) is an activity verb. Therefore, we can express the idea that he ran for

two minutes within the period of time expressed by the adverb/. Also, there is

a constraints on the duration that / can co-occur with. It should be a very short

period of time so that there is no semantic conflict between the duration expression and

the meaning of/ which indicates a short interval of time just before the speech

time.

Furthermore, there appears to be no merit in saying / is a noun (page 40).

Proclaiming that / is a noun and / is an adverb does not further students’

understanding of the differences between their two adverbial usages. As a matter of fact,



/ can occur in the same syntactic positions as other time expressions such as

, and. Specifically, it occurs before or after the (grammatical) subject,

denoting duration of time. In the textbook, words such as , and were allassigned the category “time word”. Thus, if we intend to keep assignment of categories

consistent, / should also be viewed as a “time word” using the terminology in

this textbook.

There were also some minor errors with parts of speech throughout the textbook. For

example, on page 128, it states that is a preposition. While that is an unproblematic

statement, the first example given in the section had ZAI () being used as a verb.

(4)*()/*()?

It is clear that in (4) is a verb given that it is not an adjunct or optional element; andthat it can be negated, when compare to example (5). Example (6) provides the negatedexample of (4).

(5)()/()

(6)/

In addition, on page 191, the textbook states that “/” is an interrogative

pronoun. However, it is not an interrogative pronoun, but an interrogative adverb (e.g., Li

and Thompson 1981 and Tsai 1992). Interrogative pronouns in Chinese are the likes of/, /, and /. A pronoun is a subtype of noun, and therefore can

occur in the syntactic positions that nouns occur. Contrastively, / cannot occur

in the syntactic position that nouns can occur. To say that / is an interrogative

pronoun might have no adversary effect on students who are unschooled in syntactic

structure, but it can be perplexing for teachers as well as students with linguistics background.

Going back to grammatical explanations, we find that terming as a “dynamic particle”

is not very suggestive. Of course, the acquisition of the use of has nothing to with how

it is termed. Nevertheless, we raise this question because the term “dynamic” is not

defined in the textbook. Why not just use the more accepted term of a perfective marker?Several semantic analyses have established its status as a perfective marker, making it

more suggestive and mnemonic in nature.

Next, we come to the explanation of BA (). We understand that it is hard to teach and



learn the BA () construction, as it does not have an English equivalent, or an equivalent

in other languages as far as we can tell. However, we submit as suggestions two areaswhere pedagogical instruction can be improved. The first concerns the template on page

142, Part 2; and the second is providing discourse-pragmatic function of the BAconstruction. The following is the template cited from the textbook.

Subject + + Object + Verb + Other Element (Complement/, etc.).

It is unclear to us and students whether the constraint of “other element” refers tosyntactic or semantic features. If it is syntactic, then it over generates odd sentences,

especially when the other element is. Students would leave with the impression that as

long as they put at the end of the sentence, the BA sentence would become adequate,

leading to the following odd constructions:

(4)*/

(5)*/

If it is a semantic constraint, then it might be more helpful to explicitly spell it out. Inother words, which semantic classes of verbs can occur in this template and which

semantic classes of verb cannot occur in this template when does not serve as the

‘other element’?

The second suggestion on the instruction of BA is that the textbook could provide when

or in what context native speakers utilize this construction but not other constructions,such as the basic SVO word order sentences or the sentences with a topicalized object.Specifically, when introducing the BA construction, the textbook merely provides a

sentence template without further explanation on the discourse-pragmatic functions of theBA construction. Towards this end, the textbook can provide examples of the use of the

BA sentence in a series of sentences. In other words, we suggest that the textbook (i) provides longer context to explicate the situated use of BA construction and (ii)

demonstrates its contrast from the canonical SVO word order. The discourse-pragmaticfunction of BA sentences is one of the most frequently raised questions during class, and

we doubt that teachers without a background in discourse-pragmatic training canadequately answer these questions without support from the textbook.

Finally, sometimes the textbook put sentence patterns with similar structures together,

which might hinder students’ understanding of a particular construction. For example, the

first grammar point in Lesson 12 put four patterns of “…/…/…” all

together:



A. Subject++Measure Word+Object+/+/+Verb

B. Topic (+Subject) ++Measure Word+/+/+Verb

C. Subject +/+Object+/+/+Verb

D. The construction/+/+can also be used before an adjectives

There are two pedagogical reasons why these four patterns should not be group togetherfor instruction. First, without a English equivalent constructions to tag on to, students

would find it difficult to grasp its concept and master all four structures at once.Secondly, template D differs from templates A, B, and C in a crucial way. That is, it does

not involve object-fronting like the other three templates. In addition, unlike the other

“+Measure Word or /” components in templates A, B, and C, YIDIANR

(/) in template D is not a quantifier. These structures are fundamentally

different functionally, though some would construe that their semantic meanings aresomewhat similar. It is probably better if template D can be moved to a different lesson.

As mentioned previously, we like the new feature “That’s how Chinese says it”, in whichfunctional expression are reviewed for every five chapters. We suggest that the textbook

could also add a grammar review segment or drills such that after a few lessons, thestudents’ learning are structured to review critical grammar points.

6. Pragmatics and Discourse Instruction

Congruent with its stated “pedagogic philosophy” as a “communication-oriented”language textbook, IC incorporated various excellent features that do advance a more

spoken discourse-based pedagogy. As mentioned, stating the “Learning Objectives” andthe contextual formulation in “Relate and Get Ready” provides good mental preparation

for the situated environment of the upcoming dialogue. Two other well-placed featuresdeserving special mention are the review of “Functional Expression” after every five

lessons, and the use of “social-role” portraits in lieu of names to represent speakers ofutterances in the dialogue. The review of functional expressions highlights useful

expressions that students can focus on and reproduce in everyday context. This increasesthe opportunity for repetitive practice, as well as relates the use of Chinese to real-life

situations for novice learners. More importantly, it calls attention to the generic

interactive context where a frequent expression can be used to accomplish some sort ofnormative action. For example, after chapters 11-15, the textbook highlights

“/” as an appropriate response “upon finding someone under unusual

circumstances or showing signs of concern, anxiety, or pain”. Or the use of “”

“when one suddenly realizes something important has been forgotten or something of



consequence has gone wrong”.

The replacement of proper names with “social-role” portraits (such as waiter, sales

representatives, doctor etc.) assigned to utterances also grounds the written dialogues ashighly contextualized and representative of a particular kind of critical discourse. We feelthat this helps the student realize that certain fixed phrases are meant for certain registers.

However, perhaps due to the lack of research on Chinese discourse markers, there exist

striking inadequacies in the explanation of discourse marker usage. A single example will

suffice. The exclamatory particle AI () was introduced in Chapter 13 as an expression

of surprise or dissatisfaction (pp. 82). In the following chapter, “” was used again in

the context of a conversation involving new acquaintances at a birthday party (pp. 114-

115):

:

:

:

:

:

:

:

:

:

:

:

:

In this context, Wang Peng uses AI before complimenting Hai Lun’s child. It should be

abundantly clear even to a non-native speaker that in this context AI could not be used todo surprise or dissatisfaction. In this context, EI (/) is the appropriate usage signaling

a change of topic from the prior line of talk (from discussion of Chinese proficiency to

the baby).

7. Conclusion

Overall, we like the improvements made to the 3rd edition of IC. Particularly, welike the new layout and new structures for each lesson with its colorful and fun

illustrations that students appreciate. Separating grammar points into two parts right after

each dialogue is a plus, however more work may need to be done in terms of accuracyand making the textbook pedagogically-friendly for students. We also suggest that a newconsonant chart be made in future editions. The fonts of traditional characters can also be

carefully proofread. Most importantly, the textbooks can still improve on someexplanations of grammar points, and more discourse function instruction should be



introduced. Having said that, our students and instructors appreciate the improvements onthe new edition, and agree that IC 3rd edition is still one of the best Chinese language

primer on the market. We eagerly anticipate the next edition.

References

Dummitt, Nathan. 2008. Chinese through Tone and Color. Hippocrene Books

Lin, Yen-Hwei. 2007. The Sound of Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Li, Charles and Sandra Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese. Berkeley.

Xiao, Richard et al. 2009. A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: Core

Vocabulary for Learners. Routledge

Liancheng Chief

Ni Eng LimWei Shen

University of California, Los Angeles

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