AP Chinese Language and Culture
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Advanced Placement Chinese Language and Culture (commonly known as AP Chinese Language and Culture or AP Chinese) is a course offered by the College Board as a part of the Advanced Placement Program. Designed to be comparable to a fourth semester or equivalent college/university courses in Mandarin Chinese, these college courses deepen the students’ immersion into the language and culture of the Chinese-speaking world. Coursework within this course reflects the proficiencies exhibited throughout the Intermediate range as described in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Proficiency Guidelines.
The AP course prepares students to demonstrate their level of Chinese proficiency across the three communicative modes (interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational) and the five goal areas (communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities) as outlined in the Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century. Its aim is to provide students with ongoing and varied opportunities to further develop their proficiencies across the full range of language skills within a cultural frame of reference reflective of the richness of Chinese language and culture. Since the course interweaves language and culture learning, this exploration occurs mostly in Chinese.
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[edit] Content and Skills
Developing students’ awareness and appreciation of the elements of Chinese culture is a pervasive theme throughout the AP Chinese course. The course engages students in an exploration of both contemporary and historical Chinese culture. Students learn about various aspects of contemporary Chinese society, including geography and population, ethnic and regional diversity, travel and transportation, climate and weather, holidays and food, sports and games, and current affairs. They also explore the realm of Chinese societal relationships, examining how individuals interact with family members, elders, and peers, and integrate this knowledge into their interpersonal communications.
The course helps students broaden their world view by comparing Chinese cultural products, practices, and perspectives with those of their own society. With this background, students can ideally move beyond a basic knowledge of the products and practices of Chinese culture to an understanding of how these products and practices reflect a Chinese way of viewing the world. Throughout the course, students hone their language skills across the three communicative modes: interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational. In so doing, they develop necessary knowledge of the Chinese language, including pronunciation, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, grammatical structures, and written characters.
[edit] Interpretative Mode
Students interpret a broad range of written and oral texts. They develop reading proficiencies to identify and summarize main points and important details, and make appropriate inferences and predictions through exposure to highly contextualized written materials like advertisements, signs, and posters. They then progress through careful readings of more densely written texts excerpted or adapted from newspapers, magazine articles, contemporary literature, letters, and essays. Similarly, students develop their aural proficiencies through exposure to contextualized language excerpted or adapted from a wide variety of oral texts, ranging from the formal language heard in news broadcasts and announcements made in public places to colloquial language found in movies and television dramas.
[edit] Interpersonal Mode
The interpersonal mode involves spontaneous two-way interaction, such as conversing face-to-face or exchanging written correspondence. Teachers conduct class primarily in Chinese to facilitate students’ development of communicative strategies for initiating and sustaining conversation. Students are provided with significant opportunities to engage in class activities in which an active negotiation of meaning is required. Students also develop capacities to respond in culturally appropriate ways to questions on familiar topics, to understand conversations among native Chinese speakers, and to comprehend and compose e-mail or personal letters as part of back-and-forth communication with other Chinese speakers.
[edit] Presentational Mode
Students develop speaking proficiencies to be able to create a level-appropriate speech or report, produce a newscast or video, and narrate personal experiences and current events in a coherent fashion with comprehensible pronunciation and intonation. They also develop the ability to write and speak in a variety of settings, types of discourse, styles, and registers. Students express themselves in writing on topics they have researched. They use a variety of written discourse styles, including descriptive, narrative, expository, and persuasive. Employing the organization, vocabulary, and structures appropriate to the purpose of their writing, students make themselves understood to an audience of readers with whom they will not have the opportunity to exchange further information and ideas.
Throughout their language production in the presentational and interpersonal modes, students increasingly employ linguistically accurate Chinese. They also continue to develop sociocultural and pragmatic competences, strengthening their abilities to communicate effectively and appropriately in a variety of social, cultural, or pragmatic contexts.
[edit] Assessment
Throughout the AP Chinese course, assessments are frequent, varied, and explicitly linked to the content and skills that comprise the learning goals of each unit of study. Teachers use the AP Chinese Language and Culture Exam as a model, assessing both cultural knowledge and language skills within the context of complex tasks. They identify formative and summative assessment tasks at the beginning of each unit of study, scaffolding the learning activities throughout the unit as a means of enabling students to achieve success on each successive assessment. Before they begin each assessment task, teachers share with their students the criteria against which students’ work will be judged, which generally takes the form of rubrics.
In addition to the formative assessments completed within each unit of study, timed assessments typical of the AP Exam can be employed within each unit’s context as well. Sample reading assessments include timed reading tests with selected-response questions that assess students’ abilities to understand the main points of lengthy texts adapted from authentic sources.
