This book studies the word order and rules of Chinese, including the organization principle of Chinese syntactic structures, the elements and positions of various types of sentence elements, the four resultant sentence structures in Chinese, the topic-theme structure in Chinese, and the Chinese information focal structure, etc.

The author uses the functional principle and conceptual principle in Chinese as the major theoretical support, discusses the word order in Chinese and the differences between Chinese and Western languages through analyzing words, sentence elements, sentence patterns, constructions and other aspects. He refutes the idea that the word order in Chinese is irregular and proves it has a high regularity.  

Kang Jian studied starting 1978 at Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Lanzhou University and got Bachelor Degree of English and Master Degree of Linguistics respectively. He later worked as an English teacher at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and then pursued doctoral degree of Applied Linguistics at Boston University in USA in 1991. After that, he taught Chinese at Defense Language Institute in 1999 and now he is the Associate Professor of Chinese Department. The author has been long working on language teaching and is proficient in the theory and method of foreign language teaching and acquisition. His research areas include: the word order of Chinese, the tense and aspect of verbs and the information structure of sentences. He published papers on Journal of Chinese Linguistics and the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. In 2011, he published Chinese Syntax and Grammar, i.e., the English edition of Teaching the Word Order of Chinese in this book.