Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants Enrich Hindi and Urdu Language Study

Yale is an established participant in the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) program, sponsored by the United States Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and administered by the Institute of International Education. Thanks to this landmark program for teaching excellence and cultural interchange, students in Yale’s Hindi courses now have the opportunity to augment their curriculum with personalized language instruction with Indian teaching assistants uniquely poised to offer students the range and register of language used their contemporaries in South Asia, and provide them with individual mentoring. The FLTA program also gives our teaching assistants, who are students currently enrolled in graduate programs in India, the opportunity to gain teaching experience and knowledge of the cultures and customs of the United States while taking courses in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Yale is privileged to host two FLTAs for the 2011–2012 academic year, Diviya and Mohammad Kamran Ahsan. Both assistants will work in conjunction with Yale’s full-time Hindi instructors, Seema Khurana and Swapna Sharma, to offer Yale students an integrated curriculum of Hindi and Urdu instruction. As both languages share a great deal in common, Diviya and Kamran Ahsan will take a role in the course as a whole, and also offer specialized Hindi and Urdu sessions tailored to individual instruction. For students desiring to pursue Hindi language, Diviya will will assist our Hindi faculty at the elementary and intermediate levels, assisting with assigned course materials, running Hindi-specific classroom activities and conversation sections, and offering one-on-one tutoring. In addition, she will be offering pedagogical activities focused on contemporary South Asian life, drawing from literature, poetry, cinema, and music to provide students with authentic trends of expression in conversational Hindi. New to 2011–2012, the Hindi program is pleased to offer students who would like to augment their study of Hindi with elementary Urdu instruction a dedicated opportunity to study with Kamran Ahsan, a native speaker also fluent in Hindi who will teach Urdu script, vocabulary, and expressions in dedicated sessions running parallel to Diviya’s Hindi-specific sections.

The FLTA program represents a unique opportunity for Yale students to experience a dedicated range of language instruction almost never available to language students before an immersion course in South Asia. This high level of fundamental language preparation will allow interested students to take advantage of Yale’s numerous resources available for South Asian study abroad with a robust foundation of skills.

For details of Yale’s South Asia Languages Program, please click here.

For course offerings in South Asian languages, please click here.