The teaching purpose and teaching focus are listed at the beginning of each unit to help teachers focus on the key points when preparing or teaching the lesson and achieve the teaching purpose. To comprehensively test the students’ mastery of each unit and their ability of communication, the book provides unit tests of reading and writing, which are designed with reference to the test types in many other countries so that the results can be closest to the students’ actual Chinese proficiency and communicative ability. As for oral testing, teachers may use the “Oral Questions” in each unit review as reference questions to ask the students and test their speaking skills, or otherwise design some situations for the students to role-play, converse or discuss.

Yamin Ma, B.A. in English Language and Literature, and M.A. in Education, is currently a Chinese teacher in Island School, Hong Kong. Ma has gained years of experience in teaching Chinese as a foreign language and she actively keeps up with the trends of AP Chinese Test in U.S. and the IB Chinese Test in Europe. Her research covers English language teaching, Chinese language teaching and educational psychology. She has read and published a number of papers in international conferences.