Chinese Reading Course Grade 2 (Upper)

Author: Chen Tianshun, Zhu Tong, Xu Yanjun
Publisher:
Publishing Time: Not available
Features: Chinese Reading Course is a general Chinese reading textbook designed for the second-year reading course of the four-year Chinese Language program for international students. 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 an accuracy rate of over 90%; reading simple articles with less than 2% new vocabulary at a speed of 100 words per minute with an accuracy rate of over 80%. The purpose of this textbook is to improve students' fast reading skills through the practice of three different reading methods—extensive reading, skimming, and scanning—as well as targeted skill training. After one academic year (approximately 72 class hours) of classroom instruction, guided by teachers, students will engage with a wide range of materials—varied in theme and genre—with a total of about 300,000 words. Their reading comprehension and speed will show significant improvement. These skills include:
1. Guessing word meaning (e.g., using semantic radicals in characters to guess word meaning, guessing meaning through synonymy, using context to guess meaning).
2. Understanding long and complex sentences (e.g., using reduction to eliminate redundancy, identifying the main components, grasping the sentence structure, recognizing sentence patterns through Chinese grammatical markers, understanding special sentence structures and expressions 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 scanning for time, place, names, numbers, etc.).
Based on a basic understanding, reading speed will improve significantly. 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 scanning 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 acquire new words related to various topics and approximately 900 common written expressions, further expanding their vocabulary.
Moreover, as reading volume increases, students will widely encounter articles reflecting various aspects of Chinese politics, economy, culture, science, technology, and history, which will deepen their understanding of Chinese society and conditions.