70315 - Chinese Language and Culture III (Second Language)

Learning outcomes

The student will be able to understand and produce a wide range of texts in Chinese, and will be able to express himself or herself with ease and spontaneity.

Course contents

The course will be divided in two parts: the first part will be centerd around readings dealing with Chinese traditional culture, politics, economy and social issues, from Deng Xiaoping presidency.

The course will focus on syntactic structures and Chinese lexicon, paying special attention to synonyms and language variation used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. The course will introduce some notions of prosodic syntax and its relation to literary Chinese.

The second part will focus on the translation of excerpts taken from various Chinese books dealing with social and political issues (China and Tibet, Chinese manifestation of discontent) and will encourage the students to analyze the key elements of Chinese discourse and fundamental information structure of a written text.

 

Students are required to attend all the lessons of the Chinese language experts, which are totally 40 hours.

In any case, class attendance is mandatory and students must have total of class attendance at least of 70% or greater.

 

Readings/Bibliography

Masini Federico: Zhang Tongbing, Sun Pingping; De Troia Paolo; Dongmei Li. Il Cinese per gli Italiani. Vol 3. Hoepli

Teaching methods

Lecture and translation sessions

Assessment methods

The final exam consists of two part: the first is a translation of a text whose content will be in line with all those analyzed during teh course. Students are allowed to consult the dictionay.

The second part is a conversation about all the texts studied during the course. The evaluation will take into account students' reading skills, pronunciation, tones, and syntactic structures.

Teaching tools

Further teaching materials will be provided during the course.

Office hours

See the website of Luca Vantaggiato