How to narrate a past event (i.e. what happens first, what happens later and what happens in the end) is a very important skill for upper-intermediate and advanced learners of Chinese.
Sentence connectives refer to clause conjunctives and adverb conjunctives that are used to clarify time and/or the sequence in which things develop. Common examples are 起先，刚开始的时候，先……然后， 后来， 以后，又，同时，（紧）接着，最终，一……就，等……才. These words and structures are important discourse strategies to develop cohesive narrations. This web site is designed to help you to develop the ability to write narrative discourse of paragraph length with a special emphasis on the instruction of the sentence connectives.
This web site consists of three parts: grammar notes, exercises and video/narration exercises.
- Grammar notes include explanations of proper usage of about 30 commonly used sentence connectives and the nuances of synonyms.
- Exercises are sentence-level drills that will help consolidate your knowledge of the usage of the sentence connectives. As you move the mouse pointer over the blanks, you will see the answers.
- Video/narration exercises include nine video clips. For each video clip, there are four subcomponents: script, vocabulary, questions and narration exercise. We suggest that you use the script and vocabulary to fully understand the video clip and answer the questions before you try to narrate the entire clip. Then you can narrate it on your own or use the scaffolding exercise. Move the mouse over each blanked-out word or phrase to reveal the answer. There is also a checkbox at the end of the exercise that reveals all the answers at once.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning for funding this project. I am also very grateful to Mr. Andrew Shearer (沈安儒) for his technical support.