These books are part of a 4-volume series titled Malayan Chinese Course for Secondary (Non-Chinese) Schools by Nanyang Book Company. As the title indicates, this series was written for non-chinese schools where the medium for teaching was English and Chinese was the secondary language. Additionally, these books published in 1961 reflected the direction for education in Malaya at the time undertaken by the central government pre-independence to help the Chinese navigate their identities away from their ancestral homeland and cultivate a new identity tied to the realities in Malaya. As such, the content of this textbook was rooted in a “Malayan context”.Each volume contains 47 essays and short pieces which were to be completed over one school year. The primary focus of this textbook was to help students gain a deeper understanding of classical Chinese and improve their writing with model essays in various formats.This series was also unique in that the learning materials were based on learning themes rather than difficulty which was the typical approach employed for textbooks.
