媒体与信息
Méitǐ yǔ xìnxī — Media and Messages
Media literacy, conducted in Chinese. Advertisements, headlines and influencer posts — who made this, what do they want, and what did they leave out? The language is the vehicle; the thinking is the point.
Unit objectives
- Read Chinese advertisements and headlines critically
- Identify who made a message and what they want
- Distinguish fact, opinion and persuasion in a text
- Write a short piece of persuasive copy, then dismantle their own
Key vocabulary
媒体 广告 新闻 标题 事实 观点 说服 目的 可靠 误导
Four questions, asked in Chinese
The same four every time, applied to every text in the unit:
谁做的？ Who made it?
目的是什么？ What is its purpose?
哪些是事实？ Which parts are facts?
没说什么？ What did it leave out?
Reading against the grain
What ads do
Real Chinese advertisements, decoded. Short copy makes them ideal reading practice.
Headlines
How the same event gets three different headlines — and what each choice of word does.
Fact or opinion?
Sorting sentences from a real article. Harder than it sounds, in any language.
Influencers & selling
Chinese livestream shopping — enormous, fast, and a very clear case of persuasion at work.
Write an ad
Students write persuasive copy for something invented — then swap and apply the four questions to each other’s.
Check something real
Taking a claim they’ve actually seen online and trying to verify it in Chinese sources.
Shopping as live entertainment
Livestream commerce is vastly bigger in China than anywhere else — hosts selling for hours to millions of viewers at once, with countdown timers, limited stock and enormous single-day totals. The persuasion techniques are unusually visible precisely because the format is so compressed: urgency, scarcity, social proof, all in plain sight within minutes. That makes it excellent teaching material. Students who can name those techniques in Chinese generally spot them faster in their own language too.
Unit 4 progress check
A light, no-pressure way to see what’s sticking:
- Can your child ask the four questions of a text in Chinese?
- Can they separate fact from opinion in a short article?
- Did they notice what their own ad left out?
Writing persuasion and then dismantling it is the strongest part of the unit. Don’t skip the swap.