Guidelines and Priorities: Bengali

Priorities in Ranked Order

  1. Bengali textbook: Decide on a textbook. Evaluate Alibha Dakshi’s Learning Bengali.
  2. Development of supplementary materials that relate to the lessons of the selected textbook in the form of a graded reader (Elementary level)
    • Attention to develop materials sequentially according to the sequence given in the textbook.
    • Inclusion of audio and video materials related to supplementary materials.
  3. Development of grammar reference book.
  4. Development of a graded reader for the Intermediate level.
  5. Glossary by category.

Suggestions Potentially of Interest for the Broader Pedagogical Materials Project

From the Group on Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, and Telugu.

  1. Annotated bibliographies of resources available for language teaching.
  2. Collaboration with the Central Institute of Indian Languages to refit some of their publications for use with U.S. students.
  3. The following might be examined as productive models and resources for pedagogy:
    • Marathi in Context, forthcoming.
    • Teaching Language in Context by Alice Omaggio Hadley.
  4. Make available Amar Chitra Katha comic books, published in all the major languages of India from Bombay by Anant Pai.
  5. Katha prize stories. Published annually since 1991. Contain stories translated into English from various Indic languages. The objective would be to collect the original short stories and augment them with glossaries for use in readers.
  6. Rapidex volumes for English instruction, mostly for the sake of the vocabularies, which might be used as core vocabularies. One example is the Bengali conversation and phrase book, Rapidex English speaking course. Delhi : Pustak Mahal, 1988.
  7. A vehicle for capturing Web documents in various idiosyncratic encoding systems and converting them to Unicode for use in language pedagogy.

Working group for Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, and Telugu.
Pedagogical Materials Project
March 7- 8, 2003
University of Pennsylvania