The Hainan YuDa Foreign Language Academy was founded by a professional career educator who understands and appreciates that real schools use real textbooks.

 

The professional educators, at the Hainan YuDa Foreign Language Academy, know that a sound and effective English language curriculum must be driven by time-proven textbooks and teaching materials, and that these must be delivered by real teachers who possess a wealth of field-related experience and expertise.

 

A great deal of research, time and effort went into the selection of our textbooks and classroom materials. We finally selected and have been successfully using the time-honored Look, Listen & Learn! and New Concept English series, both authored by Louis George Alexander, and published by the internationally famous and well-respected Longman Press, which is a leader in English language program publications throughout the world.

 

The Look, Listen and Learn! series is a complete audio-visual course for children, aged seven to 12, who are learning English as a second or foreign language over a period of several years.

 

 

The explicit goal of the series is to teach children how to use English, instead of just teaching them about it, across four distinct skill sets: understanding, speaking, reading and writing, in that order. The curriculum is founded on three basic principles derived from second language acquisition theory: 1) That nothing will be spoken before it is heard; 2) That nothing will be read before it has been spoken, and; 3) That nothing will be written before it has been read. The Look, Listen, and Learn! series is taught conjointly by both the Chinese and foreign faculty.

 

For our middle-school through college aged students, we use two primary textbooks: The New Concept English series (pictured above) and the Cambridge New Interchange Series.  Both are designed to build upon the skill sets achieved in the earlier, Look, Listen & Learn! series.  Specifically, listening, speaking, reading and writing skills are enhanced through a series of short essays or topic discussions, followed by a list of detailed questions to test the students’ listening and reading comprehension.  Both series systematically enhance the students' sophistication with English over time and gradually guide them into thinking in English. Both sets of texts are taught exclusively by the foreign faculty so that the students are completely immersed in an English language environment.