Chinese Reading Course (Grade 2) - Part 1

Author: Chen Tienshun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-01-01
Features: Chinese Reading Course is a general Chinese reading textbook designed for the second-year reading course of the four-year Chinese Language major for non-Chinese speakers. It is also suitable for foreign friends who have mastered 2,000 common Chinese words and basic Chinese grammar for self-study. Students enrolled in this course should have a reading level equivalent to the graduation standard of the first year, which means: reading familiar short passages at a speed of 120 words per minute with a comprehension accuracy of over 90%; reading shallow articles with less than 2% new vocabulary at a speed of 100 words per minute with a comprehension accuracy of over 80%. The purpose of this textbook is to improve students' rapid reading skills through the practice of three different reading methods—extensive reading, skimming, and consultation—and targeted skill training. After one academic year (approximately 72 class hours) of classroom teaching, guided by teachers, students will engage with a wide range of materials with diverse themes and genres, totaling about 300,000 words. Their reading comprehension ability and reading speed will show significant improvement. These abilities include:
1. Guessing word meanings (e.g., using semantic radicals in characters to guess word meanings, using synonymy to guess word meanings, using context to guess word meanings).
2. Understanding long and complex sentences (e.g., using reduction to eliminate redundancy, identifying the main components, grasping the sentence structure, recognizing sentence patterns using Chinese grammatical markers, understanding special sentence structures and expression habits in written Chinese).
3. Reading paragraphs and short essays (mastering the main ideas and content of the text, identifying details that support the main ideas, summarizing the text).
4. Reading long passages (understanding the main idea of the text, quickly obtaining the required information, quickly searching for time, place, names, numbers, and other data).
Based on a basic understanding, reading speed will significantly improve. Extensive reading speed will increase from 110 words per minute to 200 words per minute, skimming speed from 130 words per minute to 250 words per minute, and consultation speed from 150 words per minute to 300 words per minute. Additionally, as reading volume increases, students' existing vocabulary will be further consolidated, and they will master approximately 900 common written expressions related to different topics during the reading process, further expanding their vocabulary.
Third, as reading volume increases, students will widely encounter articles reflecting various aspects of Chinese politics, economy, culture, science, technology, and history, which will further deepen their understanding of Chinese society and conditions.