The Second Language Teaching and Research Center at the University of Utah (L2TReC) is committed to helping students of all grades and languages continue their language learning during COVID-19 school closures.

On this page you will find a collection of resources to aid teachers, parents, caregivers and students as they navigate language learning in non-classroom settings.

Chinese Language Resources:

State of Utah DLI Teaching Resources - Chinese Elementary

State of Utah DLI Teaching Resources - Chinese Secondary

Learning tools for Different Levels
1. Panda Tree: Free online games and affortable lesson plans for learning Mandarin Chinese. https://www.pandatree.com/games/chinese
2. Fun China World: This website has a lot of features and evidence-based lessons to help teachers in Chinese teaching. It also provides a lot of fun games help students in different level learn Chinese. https://funchinaworld.com/
3. Duolingo: This website supports students to learn Chinese on a daily basis. https://www.duolingo.com/course/zh/en/Learn-Chinese
4. Mandarin Matrix: Utah Chinese DLI program is using their textbooks and online classrooms to support students’ learning. https://mandarinmatrix.org/
5. Listening/Speaking:
  1. FluentU: This is a website to guide students to learn Chinese with real-world videos. https://www.fluentu.com/chinese/
  2. Hello Talk: This is an app to learn a language (including Chinese) by chatting with native speakers around the world for free. https://www.hellotalk.com/?lang=en
6. Reading:
  1. The Chairman’s Bao: This website collects a lot of current news categorized by HSK level. Students can choose a news article based on their own level to take related lessons. https://www.thechairmansbao.com/
  2. Ponddy Reader: Students can find a lot of reading resources from this website and use their AI tools to learn Chinese characters/words/phrases in a fast pace. https://reader.ponddy.com/
7. Grammar:
  1. Chinese Boost is a great webstite to learn basic Chinese grammar. https://www.chineseboost.com/grammar/
  2. Chinese Grammar Wiki: A comprehensive resource for Chinese grammar. https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/
8. Chinese news for higher levels: This website includes the news articles and videos of news and interviews about different kinds of topics. https://www.voachinese.com/
9. Chinese movies & TV programs: https://www.youku.com/
10. Chinese dictionaries:
  1. Pleco: https://www.pleco.com/
  2. Chinese converter: Helps students convert Chinese characters to pinyin. https://www.chineseconverter.com/en/convert/chinese-to-pinyin
Online tools to support teachers to plan a distanced learning lesson
1. Nearpod: This is a student engagement platform for students to do online discussion. https://nearpod.com/
2. Flipgrid: This is a powerful tool for students to turn in their own audio recording assignments. It might be embedded in certain schools’ Canvas as a teaching tool. https://info.flipgrid.com/
3. Vizia: This is an online tool to help teachers embed quizzes with any video clips. Students can take a quiz while watching the video. https://vizia.co/
4. Quizlet: This is a powerful website for teachers to create flash cards for any specific lesson. It will help teachers to generate fun games with the flash cards. https://quizlet.com/

Resources for All Languages:

Software & Apps

AAPPL Communication Builder Online

offers a tool that allows interpersonal speaking practice. Tasks are organized by language and by level.

Quick Steps to Get Started at AAPPL

Watch the Intro Video

‘’Create FREE Parent Account (‘PARTICIPANT’)

Create FREE Student Account (‘LEARNER’)

Conjuguemos

offers a free Basic Teacher Premium Account until the end of the school year (July, 2020), with a variety of verb learning games. Your students can enjoy multiplayer games and compete with their friends.

Offers Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and Latin.

Offers free activites without requiring an account.

Duolingo

offers a gamified learning app for iOS and Android, as well as desktop sofware in over 32 languages.

Quick Steps to Get Started at Duoloingo

Select your language at Duolingo.

Offers a free trial witahout signing up for an account.

Woodpecker

offers a video player full of features designed to help you improve your foreign language skills. Practice commonly used vocabulary, tones and accents while watching a huge library of popular shows from all over the world.

Woodpecker currently supports speakers of Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese learning English. They also support English speakers learning Mandarin, Spanish, French, and Vietnamese.

Video Capturing Software for Course Creation

Vizia

Vizia allows you to add polls, quizzes, open ended questions and 'calls to action' to specific points in a video. As viewers watch the video the interactive elements pop up and they can type in their response. At the end of the video, a score for any quizzes is given.

The engineering at Teachable developed Vizia, a free tool for making videos interactive. The project was part of a hack week (a week devoted to special projects).

Screencast-o-matic

Screencast-O-Matic is a screencasting and video editing software tool that can be launched directly from a browser.

Capture any area of your screen. Add audio narration or video from your webcam. Record lectures, tutorials, demos and games. Low priced paid screencast-o-matic education plans allow for student video feedback and allow you to record and draw on your screen to annotate your feedback on assignments.

Videos

This is Language

is offering a special rate due to worldwide school closures related to COVID-19. This online subscription provides tiered authentic language videos and aligned activities.

Quick Steps to Get Started at This is Language

Check that your language is offered

Check the Covid-19 Free Trial page for plan options.

Fluentkey

free authentic video service, with paid subscription for advanced features. “Taking your class online: Synchronous and Asynchronous Learning”.

Turn listening into an engaging classroom activity with FluentKey Live – an interactive comprehension game. Offers a free plan.

COERLL

Large open source video and audio resources for Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Latin, Spanish, and other languages.

Includes video interviews with heritage/native speakers for several languages.

General Practice

Fluency Matters

offers free e-learning in 21 day courses.

Also offers various low price online learning methods

My Curious Classes

offers various online resources for world language learning and ways to add variety to teaching.

My Curious Classes