General Description: The Mandarin Chinese 4 course not only builds upon the skills developed in FO167A/B - Mandarin Chinese 3 but will also help students develop advanced language skills required for the following AP or IB courses. This advanced Chinese course will further enrich students’ knowledge on various aspects of Chinese culture and society such as festivals, history, geography, population, food, and transportation. Students will learn to apply their cultural knowledge to communicative tasks by acquiring rich vocabulary, idiomatic expressions and complex sentence structures. Chinese proverbs, poetry, contemporary TV shows and films will be incorporated in the learning activities. At the end of the course, students will be able to move beyond a basic knowledge of the products and practices of Chinese culture to an understanding of how they reflect a Chinese way of viewing the world.

Since it is an advanced language course, students should have a strong motivation to learn independently as well as to follow the teacher's instructions well.

Content: This course aims to help students increase their Chinese language ability, provide extended information about their school life, and explore the core topics of health, gender equality, environmental protection, investment, travel and career. Students will also delve into the customs, history, and art forms of Chinese people to deepen their understanding of the unique culture. 

The content and activities are designed to help students achieve language proficiency in all five goal areas of world language education: to communicate effectively in a variety of situations, to interact with cultural understanding, to use the language in academic and career related situations, to develop insight into the nature of language and culture, and to participate in multilingual communities around the world.

Strategies: This Chinese 4 course is designed to develop student’s Chinese proficiency in the four modalities of language learning: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Classroom instruction is predominantly delivered in Chinese. Students will feel comfortable to speak mostly in the target language of the class. They will acquire Chinese communication skills through a myriad of contextualized and personalized real-world scenarios. The class will integrate various learning activities such as music, art, acting and games. Students will be provided with collaborative learning opportunities along with a variety of oral and written projects and assessments to support their progress and success in learning the language.

Homework: Students are expected to spend 30 minutes daily on homework.