Qiang Zhang

Developing Advanced Proficiency in Chinese through Modern Issues serves as a solid foundational textbook for the intermediate level in two volumes, providing students with a comprehensive understanding of language and concepts.This textbook, along with a set of video clips and articles related to the lesson topics, is designed to facilitate the transition to advanced proficiency. It covers a broad spectrum of subjects, including China’s development and trends in music, movies, sports, housing, and its competitive social landscape in Volume 1, as well as social media, technology, space exploration, China’s poverty eradication initiatives, and other modern technologies in Volume 2.The text is accompanied by e-resources, allowing students to easily access lesson video files with Chinese subtitles. English translations will be available in the teacher resources section of the e-resources. Additionally, the e-resources will provide links to authentic materials from various sources.Furthermore, the textbook offers teacher resources, including study guides, lesson PowerPoint presentations, grading rubrics, and more to support instructors using it as a primary text for college-level courses. Instructors can request access to the test bank by emailing us directly.

Developing Advanced Proficiency in Chinese through Modern Issues serves as a solid foundational textbook for the intermediate level in two volumes, providing students with a comprehensive understanding of language and concepts.This textbook, along with a set of video clips and articles related to the lesson topics, is designed to facilitate the transition to advanced proficiency. It covers a broad spectrum of subjects, including China’s development and trends in music, movies, sports, housing, and its competitive social landscape in Volume 1, as well as social media, technology, space exploration, China’s poverty eradication initiatives, and other modern technologies in Volume 2.The text is accompanied by e-resources, allowing students to easily access lesson video files with Chinese subtitles. English translations will be available in the teacher resources section of the e-resources. Additionally, the e-resources will provide links to authentic materials from various sources.Furthermore, the textbook offers teacher resources, including study guides, lesson PowerPoint presentations, grading rubrics, and more to support instructors using it as a primary text for college-level courses. Instructors can request access to the test bank by emailing us directly.

Developing Advanced Proficiency in Chinese through Modern Issues serves as a solid foundational textbook for the intermediate level in two volumes, providing students with a comprehensive understanding of language and concepts. The twenty-four units include a wide range of topics, including popular culture, e-commerce, green energy, and telecommunications fraud, reflecting the dynamic nature of China's evolving social landscape. Designed for two sequential advanced courses, the set spans one academic year.While Volume 1 features podcast-style dialogues to bridge spoken and written language, Volume 2 focuses on formal news-style reports, preparing learners for advanced skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Each lesson includes audiovisual content, readings, vocabulary, and discussion questions, encouraging students to critically engage with key issues and apply their language skills in real-world contexts.Key grammar and language points are explained with examples, and targeted exercises reinforce learning. Reading passages, discussions, and practical assignments foster real-world language use, including summarizing news-related articles or videos, expressing personal opinions, and translation.Support materials for this book include video materials and authentic resources, supporting learners in reaching advanced proficiency. This volume is an invaluable resource for those striving to excel in Chinese while gaining a deep understanding of contemporary Chinese society.

Developing Advanced Proficiency in Chinese through Modern Issues serves as a solid foundational textbook for the intermediate level in two volumes, providing students with a comprehensive understanding of language and concepts. The twenty-four units include a wide range of topics, including popular culture, e-commerce, green energy, and telecommunications fraud, reflecting the dynamic nature of China's evolving social landscape. Designed for two sequential advanced courses, the set spans one academic year.While Volume 1 features podcast-style dialogues to bridge spoken and written language, Volume 2 focuses on formal news-style reports, preparing learners for advanced skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Each lesson includes audiovisual content, readings, vocabulary, and discussion questions, encouraging students to critically engage with key issues and apply their language skills in real-world contexts.Key grammar and language points are explained with examples, and targeted exercises reinforce learning. Reading passages, discussions, and practical assignments foster real-world language use, including summarizing news-related articles or videos, expressing personal opinions, and translation.Support materials for this book include video materials and authentic resources, supporting learners in reaching advanced proficiency. This volume is an invaluable resource for those striving to excel in Chinese while gaining a deep understanding of contemporary Chinese society.

Teaching plans often serve as windows into local pedagogical practices, sociocultural influences, and language learning priorities. Despite their centrality to teaching practice, authentic and detailed examples of teaching plans remain rare.This volume addresses that gap.This book presents 13 teaching plans authored by Chinese EFL teachers working in both secondary and tertiary institutions. These contributions offer unique insights into how English is taught, conceptualized, and adapted within the Chinese educational context. Each teaching plan goes beyond the procedural "what" of teaching to explore the deeper "why"-revealing how teachers align objectives with student needs, select materials in response to cultural and linguistic considerations, and design learning activities that foster engagement and critical thinking. They reflect a blend of traditional approaches and innovative strategies, shaped by curriculum standards, examination pressures, and evolving views on English language education in China. They demonstrate how Chinese teachers creatively navigate between global TESOL principles and local pedagogical realities.As the first collection of its kind, this book carries both practical and scholarly significance. For novice teachers, it serves as a valuable resource for learning from peers and exploring varied approaches to lesson planning. For experienced educators, it offers a platform to reflect on their own practices and engage in comparative pedagogy. For researchers, this volume opens a window into teacher cognition and curriculum enactment in the Chinese EFL context, contributing to the broader global conversation on language education.

This book describes various crisis situations in transitional China, and by analyzing the unique characteristics and backgrounds of emergencies and crisis, it argues that crisis management has become a major challenge for the Chinese governments. It then discusses the chronology of crisis, organizational behaviors and the decision-making processes to construct a modern crisis management system in detail, to shed light on the creation of a strategic design and institutional framework of crisis management in China. In so doing, it provides not only insights into the dynamics of crisis decision-making and communication, but also solutions for possible problems specific to a transitional political regime in China.

This book describes various crisis situations in transitional China, and by analyzing the unique characteristics and backgrounds of emergencies and crisis, it argues that crisis management has become a major challenge for the Chinese governments. It then discusses the chronology of crisis, organizational behaviors and the decision-making processes to construct a modern crisis management system in detail, to shed light on the creation of a strategic design and institutional framework of crisis management in China. In so doing, it provides not only insights into the dynamics of crisis decision-making and communication, but also solutions for possible problems specific to a transitional political regime in China.

This book examines how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has attempted to bolster its nationalist legitimacy through the utilisation of Chinese history. The authors identify two different modes of nationalism - aggressive and consensual - both of which are linked to the historical memory of the late Qing Dynasty and Republican era. Aggressive nationalism dwells on China’s traumatic “century of humiliation” and is intended to incite popular resentment towards former imperialist powers (particularly Japan and the US) whenever they are deemed to still be acting in a provocative manner in their dealings with China. The aim is to remind the Chinese people that the CCP liberated China from imperialism after 1949 and has since restored national pride. Consensual nationalism is more conciliatory, emphasising common historical ties with the Guomindang (KMT) during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Republican era. Here, the CCP is trying to promote itself as the party of national harmony andunity, with the long-term objective being peaceful reunification with Taiwan. However, the public response in China has not always been supportive of the CCP’s claims to be the sole defender of Chinese national interests. Some critics have suggested that China would have been better off if the KMT had won the civil war instead of the CCP. Others have insisted that the party is hopelessly weak on issues of national importance and that China is no stronger now than it was during the final throes of the much-hated Qing Dynasty. This book will be of interest to research students and scholars of Chinese politics, history and international relations.

The last few years have witnessed fast development on dictionary learning approaches for a set of visual computing tasks, largely due to their utilization in developing new techniques based on sparse representation. Compared with conventional techniques employing manually defined dictionaries, such as Fourier Transform and Wavelet Transform, dictionary learning aims at obtaining a dictionary adaptively from the data so as to support optimal sparse representation of the data. In contrast to conventional clustering algorithms like K-means, where a data point is associated with only one cluster center, in a dictionary-based representation, a data point can be associated with a small set of dictionary atoms. Thus, dictionary learning provides a more flexible representation of data and may have the potential to capture more relevant features from the original feature space of the data. One of the early algorithms for dictionary learning is K-SVD. In recent years, many variations/extensionsof K-SVD and other new algorithms have been proposed, with some aiming at adding discriminative capability to the dictionary, and some attempting to model the relationship of multiple dictionaries. One prominent application of dictionary learning is in the general field of visual computing, where long-standing challenges have seen promising new solutions based on sparse representation with learned dictionaries. With a timely review of recent advances of dictionary learning in visual computing, covering the most recent literature with an emphasis on papers after 2008, this book provides a systematic presentation of the general methodologies, specific algorithms, and examples of applications for those who wish to have a quick start on this subject.