To find out more about the STARTALK program, visit its website here.
Look under “Resources” for a wealth of information on foundational principles, videos of sample classes, and instructional activities.
Other useful sites:
• The Asia Society
Look under “Educator Resources” here for information and videos on classroom instruction.
• NYU Steinhardt School
With funding from the Freeman Foundation, the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development completed the Project Developing Chinese Language Teaching’s Remote Teaching Resources, and have made the results available here. The story of Dr. Sun Yatsen that Hawai‘i’s 2021 STARTALK program is using was found on this site.
Other Useful Resources
• Identifying Chinese Surnames. By HUANG Xu and Cynthia Ning. This is a listing of Chinese surnames with glosses indicating how people usually identify each name (“the character LIN that is composed of two trees”).
• The Chemical Elements. The YouTube link is to an English song subtitled in Chinese. The list of chemical elements in English and Chinese follows.
• Chinese Writing Guide. This manuscript by Qin Xue Herzberg and Larry Herzberg was shared on the Internet. The authors have published books on Chinese grammar and proverbs that are available through Amazon.
• Chinese Etymology. Richard Sears spent decades gathering information on the etymologies of over 100,000 Chinese characters, and makes them available on this site.
• Chinese Text Project. The Chinese Text Project is an online open-access digital library of pre-modern Chinese texts. It contains over thirty thousand titles and more than five billion characters, and offers traditional and simplified character text, as well as English translations. The site also facilitates word searches.
Instructional Videos for Tech Tools
• Jamboard. A tool available on Google Drive for participants to post simultaneously (like writing together on a whiteboard)
• Lingt. Use Lingt to create and assign speaking and writing conversational activities to your students. There are three short tutorials: to create, assign, and assess Lingt tasks.
• Padlet. Free Interactive online bulletin board. Look here for more suggestions on how to use Padlet in the classroom.
• Catalyst. This is the site STARTALK requires that teacher participants in its programs use to build an e-portfolio, and to track professional growth.
About Effective Classroom Teaching
• Day 1 Hour 1: Beginning Chinese for High School students. Brigham Young University Flagship Program. The instructor speaks only in Chinese, using language that the students can understand because of accompanying actions and context. He confirms understanding by having students follow along and complete tasks (based on their understanding) on a worksheet. More advanced students in the room serve as teaching assistants, but many checks for understanding ensure that the slower students are keeping up. The class completes many listening comprehension tasks before students are encouraged to try speaking. Ringing the meditation bowl demarcates activities, of which there are many. When students have absorbed as much as they can out of one activity, the class moves on to another.
• Discussion of Speaking Practice via Pairwork and Mingling. This is an excerpt from materials available via Encounters, by Yale University Press.
• Polygot Olly Richards discusses how to learn Vocabulary Through Reading. He promotes “Story Learning”, and has made many YouTube videos about his experiences in language learning.