"Chaoyue: Advancing in Chinese" covers the five Cs--communication, cultures, comparisons, connections, and communities--and follows three communicative modes in lesson design: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational. The authors arrange their lessons around four topics intrinsically interesting to students: the self, schooling, social customs, and the global village, fostering a full appreciation of Chinese culture. Each lesson contains warm-up activities, mini-dialogues, authentic readings, conversational relays, a cultural unit, examples of sentence patterns, and a vocabulary list. Two review lessons are geared specifically toward synthesizing and reinforcing the language and culture skills taught throughout the book, and footnote glossaries assist in reading comprehension.

Written by experienced Chinese language instructors, "Chaoyue" helps students reach the preadvanced proficiency level within two semesters, or approximately 150 to 180 hours of course time. The preadvanced stage is comparable to a fourth-semester college Chinese course, or 250 hours of instruction. Unlike other language texts, "Chaoyue" is printed in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, as well as the phonetic systems used in China ( "pinyin") and Taiwan ( "zhuyin fuhao"). It also includes a CD-ROM with additional assignments and review as well as an online teacher manual.

Lesson sections include:

-Warm-up activities that articulate the lesson's theme and activate students' prior knowledge

-Short readings in the form of letters, e-mails, reports, dialogues, stories, and interviews

-Dialogue practice with key vocabulary and sentence patterns

-Interactive activities such as surveys, debates, and small group discussions

-Conversational relays that ask pairs to complete minidialogues

-Authentic readings in the form of advertisements, Web sites, maps, and signs, with multiple-choice review questions

-Common expressions that relate to the lesson theme