It has been over ten years since Integrated Chinese (IC) came into existence in 1997. During these years, amid all the historical changes that took place in China and the rest of the world, the demand for Chinese language teaching-learning materials has been growing dramatically. We are greatly encouraged by the fact that IC not only has been a widely used textbook at the college level all over the United States and beyond, but also has become
increasingly popular with advanced language students at high schools. Over the years, regular feedback from the users of IC, both students and teachers, has greatly facilitated our repeated revisions of the series. Following its second edition published in 2005 that featured relatively minor changes and adjustments, the third edition is the result of a much more extensive revision. Level 1 now contains 10 lessons in Part 1 and 10 lessons in Part 2 for maximum fl exibility. Based on the reports from many teachers that they could not fi nish all the lessons in the Level 1 volumes within one academic year, we have, for the third edition, eliminated the chapters “At the Library” and “At the Post Offi ce,” as the language contents in these chapters have become somewhat obsolete. The chapter “Hometown” has also been removed, but part of its content has been incorporated into other chapters.