World Cities: Beijing
Submitted by Xu Zhang
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Standards:
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Unit Timeframe:
one semester, 15 lessons, 1.5 hours per lesson
Unit Overview:
On completion of the unit, the students will be able to:
(1) Communicate in Chinese more proficiently and appropriately not only in daily conversations but also in a more academic setting, especially concerning topics related to Beijing and interactions with people from Beijing;
(2) Gain more knowledge of the geography, history, and the social life of people in Beijing;
(3) Have a better understanding of the local culture in Beijing;
(4) Enrich their perspectives and develop insights in viewing Beijing and its culture as well as the American culture through comparison and contrast.
Context:
Syllabus types:
A content-based, communicative syllabus, which also embraces merits of other syllabi types that have been supported by research to be beneficial to language acquisition; class activities are mainly task-based.The students and their level of language proficiency
This course is designed for intermediate Chinese learners who have reached a basic level of proficiency when they studied Chinese in elementary or secondary school. They should be relatively fluent and reasonably culturally appropriate in daily conversations and have a sight vocabulary of about 1,000 Chinese characters and above. They should be able to understand Chinese spoken to them in a reasonably/relatively natural speed. As reality indicates, their writing proficiency is expected to be much lower than that of other skills. However, they should be able to write simple and relatively culturally appropriate messages or small compositions by employing basic sentence structures and simple characters. Though a small portion of them may have an awareness of stylistic/register differences in formal-informal and daily-academic writings and speech, they are not yet expected to have such competence as to notice them or to use appropriately on their own. It is assumed here that the students are in the traditional age-range, i.e., in their late teens and early twenties.Level of difficulty:
This unit of Beijing is targeted to the intermediate level of language proficiency. At the same time, the author of these lesson plans is aware of the diversity of students and their individual differences. It is therefore recommended that adaptations to the plans be made in actual implementation. Teachers may also use these plans with students at other levels by changing the tasks' linguistic and /or cognitive complexity and the time frame.The Chinese orthography
This unit adopted the modern/simplified version of Chinese orthography on the grounds that it is a unit on the capital city of China, which is a city of the Mainland where simplified Chinese is considered standard. This modern version has been used by all Mainland Chinese, the majority of native speakers of the language, for many years and has been a well-established and legitimate form of written Chinese. Also, the adoption of the modern version adds authenticity to the course material.
General Unit References and Resources:
(listed at the lesson level)
Links or files for unit content: A new window will open for each lesson.
Lesson 01: World Cities: Beijing -- Introduction
Lesson 02: Geography of Beijing
Lesson 03: A Touch of History -- City history and the Chinese concept of city planning
Lesson 04: Urban Public Landscape
Lesson 05: Population and Migration
Lesson 06: Urbanization
Lesson 07: Environmental Issues
Lesson 08: Transportation -- Traffic and Transportation in Beijing
Lesson 09: Recreation and Leisure
Lesson 10: Housing
Lesson 11: Industry
Lesson 12: Education in Beijing
Lesson 13: Comparison I -- Beijing and Other Cities in China
Lesson 14: Comparison II: Beijing and Other Cities in the World
Unit Assessment