1. First Steps in Chinese is a series of programs intended to teach the grammar of spoken Chinese and many useful vocabulary items. There will be approximately 20 programs in the total series. No language other than Chinese is used in these programs so that students will be encouraged not to think in their native tongue but to deal with the problems presented directly in Chinese. Accompanying quiz programs test students and report a grade to the instructor as well as to the student him- or herself.
2. Four-sided flashcards are designed to be printed "back-to-back" on card stock. Students should cut the sheets vertically once down the center and then separate them by cutting along the horizontal lines. After being folded, "page 1" shows the English definition, e.g., "dog," "page 3" (which is the next page the user can peek at) shows the romanization, "gou3." After checking their pronunciations, students may attempt to write the character. If they experience difficulty, then they can unfold the card further to look at "page 2," where they receive a clue: "canine radical + phonetic 'ju4'". Since students will have already studied the quan3 and ju4, they should be fairly well able to write the character gou3, which they will find on "page 4."
3. Calligraphy sheets to accompany the flashcards. A model character is printed at the top, and repeated in the first "character-rice" square. Students are to fill in the rest of the column with their own characters. At the bottom of the sheet, romanizations and one-word definitions of each character are provided. Students will need to refer to their flashcards for the stroke order of each character.
The WWW page is under continual and chaotic construction. I will post the above-mentioned materials as I find the time to do so. I very much want any constructive criticisms that could aid me in refining these materials.
All of the programmed material to be used with accompanying tape recordings. Unfortunately, I have no way of supplying interested parties with copies of the tapes used here. (Since I am not a native speaker, you probably would not want the ones that I have made anyway.) Certain "frames" (i.e., problems) require the student to answer questions that appear only in the tape recordings. I suppose that I could provide a script for those portions so that interested parties could make their own recordings.
All of these materials are offered with "no warranty, express or implied. Use at your own risk." I have used these materials extensively, both on individual computers and also over the server network that makes software available to students all over our campus, and so far the programs have done no mischief. The programs do however, write two kinds of data files onto the disks on which they are resident: They write all of each student's errors on an individual program to one file, and they keep track of how far each student has gone through that program in another file. Over time, these files can get quite long, so teachers will probably want to open them with a text editor and cut out most or all of the old records from time to time. The accompanying quiz programs record both student errors and student grades, and those files will likewise grow to unmanageable size unless periodically trimmed back.