This textbook aims to improve learners’ ability to listen and comprehend intermediate Chinese. It consists of two volumes, “Exercises & Activities” and “Texts & Answers”, with a total of 28 lessons. The content is closely connected to real life, covering areas such as common life knowledge, life stories, social issues, encyclopedic knowledge, news, interviews, novels, and academic speeches, with the goal of exposing learners to a wide variety of language materials as much as possible.

Each lesson is composed of three parts: Pre-task, During-task, and Post-task. The Pre-task part allows learners to fully warm up through sections like “Free Talk”, “Life in Pictures”, and “Filling Out Questionnaires”—it helps activate their background knowledge and eliminate language barriers, thereby increasing the proportion of content they can understand. In the During-task part, learners gradually achieve a comprehensive understanding of the text through exercises that progress from easy to difficult. The Post-task part deepens content comprehension and focuses on language forms, including both discussions on in-lesson topics and consolidation exercises for the language forms learned in the lesson.

After completing this textbook, learners will be able to understand articles, dialogues, discussions, or speeches that cover a wide range of topics and have relatively complex content and language. For topics in various contexts, such as social themes, language and characters, general comments, social etiquette, psychology and emotions, professional courses, technology, and culture, they will be able to summarize key points, grasp details accurately, understand logical structures, and analyze and infer implied information. Additionally, learners will be able to understand the meaning of unfamiliar words in context, comprehend Mandarin with a slight accent, and develop the ability to take simple notes while listening and retell the heard content relatively completely based on their notes.

◎ Centering on carefully designed listening materials, it conducts thorough listening training in a structured and hierarchical manner.

◎ It enhances the intensity of listening practice by combining whole-text listening, segmented listening, and whole-sentence listening, as well as integrating audio listening with listening to teachers’ readings.

◎ It integrates listening and speaking, extending the teaching content to real-life scenarios.

◎ It combines listening practice with exam preparation: the exercises at the end of each lesson simulate the discourse training in the HSK listening test.

This textbook is suitable for learners who have completed Developing Chinese (3rd Edition) Advanced Listening Course (I) or other advanced Chinese textbooks of equivalent proficiency, and have reached the entry-level of advanced Chinese speaking.

This book contains 28 lessons, and it is recommended that 2 class hours be allocated for each lesson. The textbook consists of two volumes: “Exercises & Activities” and “Texts & Answers”, which can be used in conjunction with each other during teaching.