Integrated Chinese Level 1 part 1, Character book, Third edition

Review by Chinese language teacher Jing Zhou of Sewickley Academy, Pittsburgh
Integrated Chinese is widely used in colleges and universities in United States. In recent years, many high schools started to use this textbook for the high school students and received positive comments. I used the third edition of Integrated Chinese for Mandarin I to Mandarin IV class and it works very well.
Integrated Chinese has published level one and level two so far. There are 20 lessons in Level 1, split into two volumes. Every five lesson, there is a summery and it is very easy for academic planning.
Level 2 has 20 lessons and splits into two volumes, one per semester. It is good for intermediate level Mandarin study. Those students who want to take AP Chinese should finish Integrated Chinese level two.
Integrated Chinese is a set of instructional materials which include textbooks, workbooks, character workbooks, teaching aids, audiotapes, videotapes, CD-ROM, computer programs, and interactive multimedia programs. It’s easy to get all variety of resources to help you to prepare the class. They also have already established a homepage on the World Wide Web which will serve as a resource center as well as a support group for the users. New materials (such as new exercises or teaching activities developed by the original Integrated Chinese textbook committee or by others) will be shared and teaching ideas will be exchanged on the internet. When I started to prepare the class, I found many valuable teaching materials online. The workbook exercises designed very well for students to use and the teacher does not need to prepare extra exercises. there are two types of exercises; one is traditional exercises (such as fill-in-the- blank, sentence completion, translation, etc.) to help students build a solid foundation. Another is communication-oriented exercises to prepare students to face the real world.
The third edition of this time-tested series has been fully updated to meet the needs of today’s students with new communicative and interactive exercises, a full-color design, up-to-date vocabulary, enhanced cultural coverage, a diverse cast of characters, and a realistic storyline linking all the dialogues and readings.
Students who completed the integrated Chinese level one can master at least 1200 vocabulary and have good balance on listening, writing, reading and speaking.
Of course, no textbook is perfect. I’ve been using this textbook for two years, and I feel that the arrangement for some grammar points teaching is not good. In this textbook, usually the grammar is split into very small pieces and falls in different lessons. For example, when the character “了”appeared in one lesson, it will only explain one usage of the word, and the other usage of the word will appear in another lesson. I prefer to introduce the usage of this character to students at one time. Split the grammar into small pieces is not helpful for students’ study and often confuses the students a lot. I tried to summarize the usage of a grammar about a single character or phrases to introduce to students and I found that works much better.
All in all, integrated Chinese is a very good textbook; I highly recommend the book for high school students.