Chinese Now! is a set of Chinese textbooks for students of the immersion program in North America.

Presented by stories, narratives, and descriptions of pictures, the textbook combined the explicit learning with the implicit learning. Teaching the Chinese language through stories, class activities, games, the textbook can effectively ensure that students have enough listening, speaking, reading and writing practice so as to help them accumulate knowledge and steadily improve their skill level in Chinese.

With effective methods like playing games and displaying the strokes orders of Chinese characters to practice Chinese writing, the textbook can help the students understand and memorize Chinese characters; through the abundant reading practice, it can also improve students’ reading abilities.

The textbook also provides the teachers with the rich Chinese teaching materials, methods and tips for teaching activities, such as comprehension questions, vocabulary exercises, pattern drills, Chinese character exercises, vocabulary classification and Chinese rhyming songs, with which teachers can save time on preparing the materials.

The textbook provides teachers and students with adequate pictures (new words cards, teaching pictures, etc.) so as to help teachers provide students the scenes of listening, reading and writing. In this way, it can help students understand the content and stimulate the students’ desires to learn.

This series of textbooks includes 5 grades and is mainly for the use of 5 primary school years. Chinese Now! (Grade 1) includes 24 lessons that can be used for 24 weeks’ formal curricula in 1 school year. That means students go to school 5 days per week, 1 to 1.5 hours for Chinese class per day, and learn 1 lesson per week. Ordinary primary schools can choose learning content according to teaching time and arrange teaching. It is advised that new words, texts, and Chinese characters be necessary contents to learn. Other contents can be used selectively according to the actual situation of teaching.

Prof. Cui Yonghua, the chief author, is a is a principal investigator in Beijing Language and Culture University. He has been engaged in the field of Chinese teaching and research since 1981. His research focuses on Chinese grammar, Chinese language teaching and Chinese information processing, and his publications include Classroom Techniques for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, Teaching and Research of Chinese as a Foreign Language (a collection of academic papers) and some textbooks coauthored with others, such as Standard Chinese Course, Learning Chinese and Learn Chinese through Listening, Speaking and Watching.