Chinese Link

Chinese Link, 2e provides a practical, learner-centered and enjoyable language and cultural learning experience for beginning students of Chinese, as well as an efficient and comprehensive teaching resource for instructors. This best-selling text takes care to introduce and explain grammar points clearly and systematically, yet not in a fashion that would be overwhelming to beginners. In keeping with the communicative focus of the text, grammar points are related to communicative task-oriented content. The textbook presents both traditional (complex) and simplified versions of Chinese characters, since learners will encounter both forms during their course of study or in travel abroad. Photographs and drawings make the text vivid and eye-catching, and to provide visual cues to aid in communicative exercises and activities. And the Video Program to accompany the “Language in Use” sections enhances the in-text dialogues by presenting them in authentic settings.

Chinese Link is by far the best structured and sequenced textbook I have ever seen with a scope covering all necessary structural and communicative elements for elementary Chinese.   I am a strong supporter for this practice to combine pinyin with characters in first year textbook since it will give learners immediate hints about the pronunciation of characters which are totally foreign to English speaking Chinese learners.   The video for ‘Language in Use’ is great!  The video presentations impressed me greatly in that with its authentic settings and naturally occurring communicative activities, they will not only help learners outside class but also in class.   —Wenze Hu Ph.D., Assistant Professor, US Naval Academy     Given students’ beginning level of proficiency in Chinese, the accompanied Pinyin would be a welcome service to the students who can then focus better on the sentence structures involved. This is a great textbook with an integrated approach for developing students’ overall linguistic and communicative competence.   The “Culture Link” sections are what make this book different from other traditional textbooks. I find the audio resources on this Companion Website wonderful and they should be taken advantage of by all who use the textbook.   I love the video presentation of this textbook. I think it tremendously enhances the dialogues and the texts because of quality of the pronunciations of the cast who acted out these texts.   —Jean Wu Ph.D., Director Chinese Language Program, University of Oregon     The grammar activities are well-guided and involve more interaction [than Integrated Chinese]. —Chao-mei Shen Ph.D., Senior Lecturer of Chinese, Rice University

Sue-mei Wu, Ph.D., Associate Teaching Professor of Chinese Studies in the Modern Languages Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the project leader and primary author for the Chinese Link textbook project (Beginning and Intermediate levels). She received her Ph.D. in linguistics, with a minor in language pedagogy, from the Ohio State University. She has taught at Ohio State University, Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University. She has devoted her linguistic, pedagogy and technology expertise to creating and developing various innovative new Chinese courses, textbooks, online courses and web pages. She has designed, developed and coordinated all levels of Chinese languages and culture courses and received several awards to support developing online language, culture and folk performance modules. She is the chair of the Chinese LearnLab of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC, funded by NSF, http://learnlab.org), and the PI of various online Chinese language and culture projects. She is the project leader and coordinator of the Chinese Online project funded by NSF. She is the co-author of Classical Chinese Primer (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press) and the co-author of a new textbook for heritage learners. Yueming Yu, PhD., Teaching Professor and Coordinator of the Chinese Studies Program of the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author of the Chinese Link textbook project. She came to CMU in 1992 to start the Chinese Program at the Department of Modern Languages and has been the Coordinator of the program ever since. She has more than 40 years of experience in teaching a foreign language. She has taught various levels of Chinese courses and in recent years has focused on the content courses at the advanced level of Chinese. Before she came to the US, she was an Associate Professor of English as well as the coordinator of the International Journalism Program at the Shanghai International Studies University. She was also one of the founding members of the English newspaper (Students Weekly) in Shanghai and a pioneer for the English News Program of Radio Shanghai. She has translated several books from English to Chinese, and compiled English-Chinese dictionaries. Her doctoral dissertation was a research on the criteria used in the selection of textbooks for teaching Chinese in the United States. Her current research focuses on pedagogical issues in Chinese language education with an emphasis on the relationship between teaching language and teaching culture, including a special focus on the teaching of heritage students. She is also the project leader of another textbook of Chinese for heritage students and published a series of Chinese textbooks for online use by high school students. Yanhui Zhang, PhD., is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD. in Second Language Acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research