Chaoyue: Advancing in Chinese covers the five Cs--communication cultures comparisons connections and communities--and follows three communicative modes in lesson design: interpersonal interpretive and presentational. The authors arrange their lessons around four topics intrinsically interesting to students: the self schooling social customs and the global village fostering a full appreciation of Chinese culture. Each lesson contains warm-up activities mini-dialogues authentic readings conversational relays a cultural unit examples of sentence patterns and a vocabulary list. Two review lessons are geared specifically toward synthesizing and reinforcing the language and culture skills taught throughout the book and footnote glossaries assist in reading comprehension. Written by experienced Chinese language instructors Chaoyue helps students reach the preadvanced proficiency level within two semesters or approximately 150 to 180 hours of course time. The preadvanced stage is comparable to a fourth-semester college Chinese course or 250 hours of instruction. Unlike other language texts Chaoyue is printed in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters as well as the phonetic systems used in China (pinyin) and Taiwan (zhuyin fuhao). It also includes a CD-ROM with additional assignments and review as well as an online teacher manual. Lesson sections include: -Warm-up activities that articulate the lesson s theme and activate students prior knowledge -Short readings in the form of letters e-mails reports dialogues stories and interviews -Dialogue practice with key vocabulary and sentence patterns -Interactive activities such as surveys debates and small group discussions -Conversational relays that ask pairs to complete minidialogues -Authentic readings in the form of advertisements Web sites maps and signs with multiple-choice review questions -Common expressions that relate to the lesson theme