I. Mid-term Speaking Test Description
The Setting: A visits B in his or her home.

Tasks:
1. A knocks on B's door and B welcomes A and offers something to drink.
2. Mutual greetings and small talk (family, what they do and what their hobbies are)
3. Asking each other what he/she did the previous evening (zuo2tian1 wan3shang4). The response should be a 3-sentence "narration".
4. Natural disengagement (such as xian4zai4 ji3dian3 le? Wo3 you3 shi4, or wo3 yao4 qu4 tu2shu1guan3 zai4jian4.)

The criterion for evaluating your speaking performance is to see how well you can accomplish the specified communicative tasks that require the following.  1) Good pronunciation and intonation (a good way for preparing for this is to listen to the tapes in addition to participating in the AT classes). 2) Correct use of vocabulary and grammatical patterns (A good technique is to practice the patterns with a classmate and correct each other whenever necessary). It is easy to read and understand the explanation in the text, but UNDERSTANDING the notes cannot ensure your accurate USE of the vocabulary and grammatical patterns). 3) Fluency, which does not equal speed; a fluent conversation should be natural, interactive and meaningful. 4) Quantity, which means you should always try and use as many as you can of the words and grammatical patterns we have learned so far.

The criterion for evaluating your reading and writing is to see how well you can recognize the learned characters and how well you can use them in writing to communicate. Some of the test items will include 1) a dictation, 2) using words in your own sentences, 3) complete unfinished sentences, 4) put words into correct and meaningful orders, 5) read a passage and answer questions about the passage, 6) the formats that you find from the IC Workbook.

Some of the useful learning techniques include 1) the use of flash cards. 2) Semantic map, putting semantically similar words together on one page for effective memorization. For instance you can put words about family together. 3) Learning to relate to the parts of the new words to the parts of words that you already know. 4) Reading and listening repeatedly to the lessons. 5) Sentence Anagram: taking the sentence apart into different phrases and put the parts back together into meaningful sentences.  6) Talking to yourself such as composing interesting dialogue that systematically recycle the words that you have learned.