Introduction

The Language Flagship is one of the most important national innovations to language learning within the US higher education system（Nugent & Slater，2017）. The Language Flagship seeks to graduate students who will take their place among the next generation of global professionals，who can apply superior level of proficiency in a foreign language in their professional work. The Language Flagship leads the nation in designing，supporting，and implementing a new paradigm for advanced language education（The Language Flagship Website）. A 2002 review of the US Department of Defense language requirements identified the Interagency Language Roundtable（ILR）Level 3，General Professional Proficiency，as the target proficiency level necessary for professionals to perform their duties adequately（Nugent & Slater，2017）. ILR Level 3 overlaps with the ACTFL Superior level. The Language Flagship Program requires the domestic programs（27 programs in 9 critical languages，including 12 Chinese programs）to bring the students from scratch to Advance level（ILR 2）in 3 or 4 years. Then students are selected to join the full-year Capstone program to study directly registered courses with the Chinese students in the first semester，and do internship in China，which will target at ACTFL Superior or ILR Level 3.

Minimum requirement for Capstone selection is ILR Level 2，which is set as the proficiency goal for the domestic programs. The 27 domestic programs decide their own curricu-lum and pedagogy aiming at bringing the students from Novice to Advance and send them to the Capstone. In order to reach this goal，the Chinese Language Flagship Program at University of Rhode Island（URI）is building a comprehensive proficiency-oriented Chinese Flagship curriculum. This curriculum is based on proficiency-oriented teaching and testing. Different teaching approaches are used at different stages.

At URI the Flagship curriculum and pedagogy include the following components.（1）The new Blended Model is the main teaching method at 100 level，and it combines face-to-face communicative teaching with computer mediated communication. Students are mainly working at sentence level at this stage.（2）At 200 level，the students are in transition from sentence to paragraph in outcome. Task-based Active Learning is the main approach to create student-centered classes.（3）When students move to upper level，300 and 400 levels，Content-based teaching and Project-based learning are the main approaches to guide the students from paragraph to discourse level.