Beijing Language and Culture University
The "Practical Chinese Reader" was the first set of dedicated textbooks on basic Chinese for use by foreign students of Chinese sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Education, who commissioned three professors at Beijing Languages Institute (now Beijing Language and Culture University) to write it in the 1970s. It was praised by American and German academics in the early 1980s as practical and advanced. It also received a warm domestic welcome for its "meticulously planned" educational content and innovation in "using the communicative principle and strengthening cultural knowledge education", and won the second prize inaugural Beijing Philosophy and Social Sciences Award for Excellence.