Yao Ming

Cheng & Tsui introduces the Chinese Biographies companion website! Visit www.chinesebiographies.com to preview chapters of the Graded Reader series. You can take advantage of resources such as:

• Audio Downloads
• Comprehension Exercises
• Crossword Puzzles
• Sentence Pattern Exercises
• Vocabulary Lists

Targeted at North American high school and college language learners, the Graded Reader Biographies seek to address the lack of Mandarin reading materials produced with that audience in mind. By focusing on international celebrities such as Yao Ming and Lang Lang, the biographies maintain a cultural context relevant to American students, allowing them to focus on bolstering their Mandarin reading skills while touching on contemporary issues.

These engaging biographies of Chinese cultural icons are designed for students who have mastered 350 to 700 characters. Pinyin annotation facilitates the reading process, making these Chinese character texts accessible at the earliest stages of learning. Each chapter is preceded and followed by comprehension questions to facilitate dialogue between teachers and students. The appendixes include additional exercises to improve students’ grammar and vocabulary. Perfect for classroom instruction or independent reading! Cheng & Tsui, 2010, B/W illustrations.

Learning how to read Chinese involves learning, literally, thousands of characters whose correspondence to sounds is not as neat as in western languages, i.e., it would be hard to "sound out" word that you haven't seen before in writing. Simplifying the task by providing simplified readers with phonetic transcriptions directly associated with the words is a very good and pedagogically valid step. Such readers are scarce in Chinese. Ms Wu used technology as an enabler to both create and share the material online, setting an excellent example. It would be great if Ms Wu utilized a linguistic and conceptual model for controlling the readability level of the text. That would be especially useful not only for heritage speakers but also for speakers learning Chinese as a foreign language.