Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates the breadth and depth of research on Chinese teaching and learning, and advocate for greater recognition and better support for the ongoing professionalization of our Chinese language teachers. It discusses the potential of certain kinds of media in the classroom, specifically WeChat and films. The book considers task-based language teaching to be the most up-to-date development of communicative methodology. It provides history of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, this time in terms of institutionalization of methods and pedagogical development. The book also discusses the issue of how to diagnose and prevent pronunciation errors, especially given the trend of communicative pedagogy toward minimizing the explicit instruction of linguistic knowledge. It also provides a detailed description of the tones and reviews the research on second-language acquisition of tones with emphasis on the particular challenges of third tone accuracy.