Business Chinese (Intermediate) Course
Syllabus
(I) Course Overview
1. Course Name: Business Chinese (Intermediate)
2. English Name: Business Chinese (Intermediate)
3. Course Category: Specialized Elective
4. Target Student: Chinese learners who have engaged in or intend to engage in trade and business cooperation with China, and Chinese learners who are interested in business Chinese. For example, overseas people coming for business activities in China, people who are in charge of Chinese business in overseas trading companies, international students in China study in economic and trade majors, and so on. Learners are required to have a certain Chinese language base, with certain listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, and the Chinese language level is equivalent to the former HSK3 level or above.
5. Class Hours: The standard teaching period is 16 weeks and the short programs are 4-8 weeks; 4 class hours per week; Credit can be obtained with more than 64 class hours (including review, examination and various teaching activities) in total. This course is 4 credits.
6. Use of Teaching Materials: “New Silk Road · Intermediate Quick-learned Business Chinese 2” (Peking University Press)
(II) Teaching Objectives
Sino-foreign economic and business communication is essentially a cross-cultural communication behavior. In order to succeed in business, first of all, we must remove the language barriers as language is a communication tool, and secondly, remove the cultural barriers, and understand and master the culture, characteristics and rules represented by the target language. Therefore, foreigners should acquire the ability to learn business Chinese in three aspects:
1. Practical and basic Chinese language knowledge and skills related to business activities.
2. The ability to carry out business communication in China's economic environment needs to master the basic characteristics of China's economic environment and the rules of economic activities, which should include not only the communication ability in trade, investment and cooperation, but also the communication ability in enterprise management.
3. Cross-cultural communication ability under the background of Sino-foreign economic exchange and cooperation, including business etiquette, custom and Chinese cultural background knowledge.
Therefore, this course will use language as the carrier, combine business activities and cross-cultural cognition, and develop the trinity ability of learners. This ability is embodied in language communication skills, which can be divided into four levels from low to high:
1. Necessary etiquette communication skills, such as welcome, greeting, introduction, apology, congratulation, etc.
2. Practical daily communication skills, such as shopping, travel, transport, communication, appointment, etc.
3. Basic business information communication skills, such as company introduction, product briefing, inquiry, quotation, consultation, presentation, etc.
4. Certain negotiation and communication skills, such as bargaining, plan making and revising, cooperation method discussing, affairs evaluating, problem analyzing, dispute resolving, etc.
Level 1 and level 2 are the communication skills that the elementary business Chinese course focuses on, while as a Business Chinese (Intermediate) course, it focuses more on levels 3 and 4.
This course is suitable for short-term intensive Chinese learning, with emphasis on oral skills training, as well as listening, reading and writing. Pay attention to the cultivation and training of students' oral communication skills in business communication and business management activities by using Chinese for common business discussion, negotiation and communication. It focuses on training learners' oral communication skills needed for business transactions and cooperation in Chinese. The purpose is to enable learners to complete the following language skills and business cultural knowledge objectives through 64 or so hours of teaching:
1. Grasp about 500 common business words, about 60 syntactic structures and grammatical rules.
2. Master the common oral expressions under the communicative functions of explanation, description, asking, suggestion, request, approval, criticism, objection, rejection, concession, etc., including the characteristics of discourse organization and conversation structure, be able to present information, explain the situation completely and accurately, and express opinions, attitudes, suggestions and requests, and to make appropriate responses to other people's views, attitudes, suggestions and requests.
3. Understand China's economic system, market characteristics, business practices and business communication culture.
(III) Teaching Content and Teaching Requirements
Topics | Taking a business cooperation process of Chinese and foreign companies as the framework, ten typical scenes are selected to arrange teaching, including: Factory visiting, company meeting, product briefing, quotation inquiring, payment method negotiating, delivery discussing, packing insurance discussing, agent join in negotiating, contract drafting and signing, settlement claiming, etc. |
Business Culture and Business Knowledge | In order to help learners learn more about China, cultivate their interest in learning business Chinese, and provide some support for the language content of this textbook, each lesson has a “Business Background Knowledge Link”, which introduces background knowledge about China's economy, society, business culture and other aspects. The content is related to the words, concepts, topics or background in the unit text. This part of the content is not compulsory, depending on the situation of the learner and studied on their own, or taught by the teacher in the classroom by way of explanation, and group discussion. Specific Contents Include: Enterprise nature, company organization structure, introduction of well-known Chinese enterprises, meeting process, types of promotion activities, Incoterms, payment method of international trade, marine insurance category, well-known insurance companies in China, the Belt and Road and China-Europe trains, etc. |
Communication Task | Be able to use common communication strategies in business activities, and use Chinese to achieve communication purposes such as dialogue, explanation, introduction and negotiation, so as to achieve professional, fluent and appropriate communication; Be able to express one's point of view accurately and clearly, respond to other's point of view, and ultimately achieve the goal of cross-cultural communication in business. |
Language Ability | Listening: Be able to understand the dialogue or speech related to the common scene of business negotiation, understand the real intention of the speaker, and basically understand the cultural content involved in the dialogue or speech. Speaking: Be able to use the vocabulary and grammar involved in the common scene of business negotiation to complete topic expression and communication tasks. Have certain paragraph expression ability, can accurately use complex sentence structure to express personal opinions, carry on relatively concrete discussion and simple negotiation with rich words, appropriateness, and strong logic. Reading: Be able to read and understand the articles, letters, charts and other language materials involved in business activities, be able to clarify the structure level of language materials, accurately understand the content, extract the main information, and basically understand the cultural content involved. Have strong reading skills such as skip reading, finding information and summarizing key points. Writing: Be able to use more complex sentence patterns for paragraph expression related to the topic of business activities. Be able to complete the writing of common narrative and descriptive language materials within the specified time, with appropriate words, correct sentence patterns, complete content, smooth and coherent expression. Be able to complete a variety of applied writing, with correct format and standard expression. |
(IV) Teaching Principles
The purpose of Business Chinese (Intermediate) is to develop students' ability to use Chinese for business communication. Its teaching principles are as follows:
1. The principle of more intensive teaching and more practice and explaining the profound in simple terms. Take students as the center, avoid teacher-centered teaching method, actively mobilize students to participate, and pay attention to inspiration and guidance. Whether it is vocabulary teaching or knowledge teaching, the method of just copying the annotation should be avoided, concise language explanation should be used, the teacher needs to pay attention to examples, and choose different teaching methods according to the characteristics of language knowledge.
2. The principle of communication. The application shall be emphasized in teaching, focusing on practice and supplemented by lecture. Teachers combine the teaching contents to create rich communication scenes of business activities, and guide students to complete the communication tasks with the vocabulary, sentence pattern and expression structure they have learned. In addition, classroom teaching will supplement relevant real cases, through student-centered case-based teaching and rich and interesting classroom interaction, to help students learn and apply, and truly build up the ability to analyze and solve problems. In addition, both vocabulary teaching and vocabulary practice should emphasize the principle of communication, explain the example sentences used with new words, and help students practice the designed situation of new words, and pay attention to the common use and authenticity.
3. Combination of Structure and Function. The teaching materials used in the course are communication-oriented, subject-oriented and communication function-oriented. The teaching goal is to be able to carry out the oral output and conversational coping skills required by various communication behaviors under a specific communication event. However, this does not mean that the user of the teaching material may not pay attention to the accuracy of the language structure. Because in business communication, it is very important to accurately convey meaning, emotion and attitude, otherwise it may affect the relationship and communication atmosphere of both parties, and then may affect the realization of will and realistic interests. Therefore, attention should be paid to the accuracy training of phonetics, vocabulary and syntactic forms, such as mechanical exercises and situational sentence-making exercises. At the same time, teachers should also pay attention to correct the errors in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.
(V) Use of Teaching Materials
1. Main Textbook. “New Silk Road · Intermediate Quick-learned Business Chinese 2” published by Peking University Press was used as the main textbook. This textbook is one of the series of business Chinese textbooks with practical content, rich practice, strong communication and comprehensive training of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The compilation of the vocabulary of the textbook not only takes into account the actual communication needs of the business scene, but also closely links with the vocabulary outline of the BCT test, which is of great help to the students preparing for the test.
2. Supplemental Learning Materials. In order to make up for the limitation and timeliness of the teaching materials, and to meet the diverse learning needs of students, teachers will select articles, videos and books related to the subject of the course for expanded teaching. The selection principle of the materials is that the content is authoritative, the viewpoint is novel and the language standard is vivid.
(VI) Test
1. Nature of Tests: Written and spoken language proficiency tests.
2. Test Purpose: Evaluation of written expression ability of business scenarios; Evaluation of business oral communication, expressive ability and flexible language ability.
3. Test Form: Written Test+Oral Test.
4. Test Content: Take the topic, communication task and expression as the main body of examination, and not stick to the text itself, so as to examine the students' practical application ability.
5. Score Weight: Among the graduation grades, the final examination score accounts for 50%, the usual performance accounts for 30%, and the attendance and classroom performance account for 20%.
