Title of class Newspaper reading

Contact hour one hour per week

Student preparation time two hours a week

Size of class no more than seven students in a group

Material FDTL Teaching of Chinese Reading Skills + current newspaper reading materials taken from the Internet

Aims

1. To introduce newspaper reading skills
2. To help students to familiarize Chinese report styles

Achievable

1. Students are required to learn about 700 commonly used newspaper vocabulary and 108 sentence patterns receptively. 
2. To enable students to read Chinese newspaper within 16 weeks
3. To enable students to analyse newspaper sentence constructions
4. To enable students to extract main points of an article
5. The FDTL material of 17 lessons should be completed within 12 weeks
6. Current newspaper materials should be used in the last four weeks of Hilary Term

How to achieve

Students are expected to prepare the relevant vocabulary and the sentence patterns in Teaching of Chinese Reading Skills before the class. Classroom time is only spent on explaining sentence constructions that students have difficulties and on the translation exercises of the relevant articles. A PowerPoint slideshow programme can be used for sentence analysis and translation work in the class. The translation work should be done as a workshop by individual students taking in turns and translating sentence by sentence. Discussions on translation skills should be encouraged by the teacher.  A final version of translation should be produced at home by students individually, together with the relevant assignments from the language exercise sections in the second half of Teaching of Chinese Reading Skills. All the home assignments must be marked with comments and must be handed back to students in the following week.