CHN439/539 Academic Writing

This ten-week course is designed for students with advanced-level Chinese language proficiency to improve Chinese writing skills. The primary goal of this course is to prepare students to communicate with native speakers of Chinese about thoughts, interests and professional knowledge in authentic formal language. The aim is to expand students’ formal written language to be able to compose formal correspondence and academic essays in Chinese. In this course, students will learn to employ the syntactic and lexical forms that distinguish formal written Chinese from oral speech. Class-time will be spent doing text analysis, identifying features of formal language at the syntactic, lexial, and discursive level, converting informal oral texts to formal written language, as well as other exercises to increase students’ command of formal written Chinese.