Hindi Program Sees Decade of Expansion

In 2001, in response to a surge in student interest and initiative, Yale began offering Hindi language instruction for the first time.  The introduction of Hindi to Yale marked the beginnings of a South Asian languages program which, until that time, had been limited to Sanskrit within the disciplinary rubric of Linguistics.  Hindi was, therefore, the first widely spoken South Asian language to be offered at Yale.  From these beginnings, the Hindi program is now composed of a suite of full-year offerings (eight courses in total), spanning elementary, intermediate, accelerated, and advanced Hindi.

Over the eleven years since its inception, Yale’s Hindi program has similarly grown to accommodate the learning needs and interests of its students.  For example, in 2007, a recognized need for a course catering to heritage speakers – students with conversational proficiency but little or no literacy skills – resulted in the created of Accelerated Hindi.  This was offered initially as a single-semester course, but from 2010 has been offered as a single course in two parts over the academic year.  Aimed at heritage speakers, the course provides students with what its instructor, Swapna Sharma, calls a “thali”, increasing students’ reading and writing proficiency through exposure to language and literature than spans bhangra, poetry, and history.

The Hindi program is supported by two indefatigable instructors, Seema Khurana and Swapna Sharma.  Both work continuously to infuse their course curricula with lively, engaging material, noting the impossibility of teaching on “auto-pilot”.  The thought and preparation that goes into each class begins on the first day, when students are asked to complete a questionnaire about their other courses, and their particular interests.  With these questionnaires as a foundation, and supported by fostering open lines of communication through the semester, Seemaji and Swapnaji (as they are known to their students), tailor readings, in-class materials, and assignments to student interests.  They harness technologies offered through the Center for Language Study (CLS), and Yale’s Classes Server, to enable students to download audio and video clips.  This, Seemaji observes, allows students to “keep language in their lives” rather than confining it to the walls of a language lab.

In addition to regular course offerings, a tradition within Yale’s Hindi program is the annual Hindi debate.  The origins of the debate offer another example of how language programming has evolved to respond to the interests of students.  In this instance, the Hindi debate began in 2008 as an initiative of Nikhil Sud, then a sophomore at Yale College.  In its inaugural year, the debate was held internally, but it has grown steadily in subsequent years to include more and more institutions recognized as centers for South Asian languages.  In 2011, twenty-one students from Columbia University, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Harvard, Cornell, and UCLA took part in the debate.  Based on the Oregon debating method, in which students deliver three minutes of prepared remarks and respond to one audience interjection.  Given the different aptitudes and levels of proficiency, the Hindi Debate includes three categories of speakers: non-native and non-heritage speakers, heritage speakers, and native speakers.