Guidelines and Priorities: Hindi

General Principles

All things being equal, the resources of the SALRC should be used to fund collaborative projects involving instructional programs at more than one educational institution. Priority should be given to projects that remedy what are perceived to be the most egregious gaps in existing instructional materials. Projects funded should lead to the production of instructional materials that make use of appropriate technology and that are not restricted to traditional “book” forms of dissemination. Technological aspects of these projects should conform to existing national and international standards (e.g., fonts should be “Unicode”). Funded projects should address defined curricular needs relative to a comprehensive multi-year curriculum for Hindi. These projects should be achievable in relatively short periods of time and not open-ended. Taken as a group, funded projects should strike a balance between materials intended for active classroom use and materials intended to serve a “reference” function.

Funding Priorities (In Ranked Order)

(1a) Multi-year graded and integrated Hindi course, comparable to those that exist for many more commonly taught languages. This is, however, an extremely large project, and is likely to be beyond the funding capabilities of the South Asia LRC.

(1b) Three-year integrated curriculum for Hindi instruction, updating the three-year curriculum written by Shapiro, Verma, and Pray in 1980. Such a curriculum would be a necessary prerequisite to the preparation of (1a) above.

(2) Archiving, rehabilitation, and renovation of existing, dated, or out of print pedagogical materials, including readers, ACTFL materials, pronunciation and grammar exercises and drills, annotated reading materials (including glossaries). An annotated website of Hindi resources should be developed and maintained.

(3) A graded reader at the first-year level.

(4) Development of a bank of classroom and instructional activities, lessons, and related materials specifically related to the development of speaking skills.

(5) Sets of supplemental instructional materials, appropriate to different levels, derived from various media, in particular, popular songs, films, advertisements, newspapers, radio, television, and internet.

(6) Core vocabulary lists for all levels of instruction, but particularly at the intermediate and advanced levels. “Extended” vocabulary lists for particular semantic areas of academic disciplines.

Activities for Linkages Between Hindi and Urdu Groups

(1) Compile lists of (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/pedagog/salarc/hindiurls.html) URLs for both Hindi and Urdu.

(2) Compile list of people willing to be part of an ongoing workgroup involved in joint Hindi and Urdu projects.

(3) Develop a listserv (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/sublist?list=hindi-urdu-t/) for people engaged in teaching or developing instructional materials for Hindi or Urdu.

(4) Institute joint curricular planning for multi-year instructional courses and materials for both Hindi and Urdu.

(5) Develop first-year reading materials than can meet the needs of both the Hindi and the Urdu language teaching communities.

Working group for Hindi
Pedagogical Materials Project
January 24-25, 2003
University of Pennsylvania