Teaching and Learning Hindi as a 'Foreign Language

Professor Ram Lakhan Meena, Central University of Rajastha,Ajmer, India

Now Hindi is the first most spoken language in the world, second Chinese, third Spanish, fourth English. About 700 million people speak Hindi in India and abroad, and the total number of people who can understand the language is near about 1082 million. Hindi language has its roots in the classical Sanskrit language. The language acquired its current form over many centuries, and numerous dialectical variations still exist. Hindi is written in the Dev Nagari script, which is common to several other Indian languages as well. Much of the vocabulary of Hindi comes from Sanskrit. Its grammar too has similarities with Sanskrit.The Constitution of India declares Hindi in the Dev Nagari script as the official language of the Union (Article 343(1)). Hindi is also enumerated as one of the twenty-five languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India. The Constitution of India has stipulated the usage of Hindi and English as the two languages of communication for the Central Government.

It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the Central government by 1965 (as per directives in Article 344 (2) and Article 351), with State governments being free to function in languages of their choice. However, passage of the Official Languages Act (1963), provided for the continued use of English, indefinitely, for all official purposes. Therefore, English is still used in official documents, courts etc. However, the constitutional directive to the Central government to spread Hindi was retained. At the State level, Hindi is the official language of the following States in India: Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and Delhi. Each of these States may also designate a co-official language; in Uttar Pradesh for instance, this language is Urdu. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of co-official language in several States also.

Hindi known as a global language.This is worth mentioning that there is a growing interest among our foreign counterparts to understand the rich Indian culture. That is why many foreign countries have established centres of learning to promote Indian studies. Apart from offering courses on Indian Religion, History and Culture, these centres also offer courses in several Indian languages like Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit. In the globalisation and privatisation scenario, growing business relations of India with other countries have been necessitating the need of cross-learning of the languages of the concerned business partner countries.This development has added to the popularity of Hindi as a popular and easy to learn Indian language in other countries. Some schools in US have  decided to introduce Hindi as a foreign language along with French, Spanish and German. Hindi has earned a global recognition for itself in linguistic arena.

 

Hindi is technical very sound language and also known as most scientific language in the world.The development in Language Technology in Indian languages and especially in Hindi started with the establishment of the Mission for the Technology Development in Indian Languages (TDIL) under the Department of Electronics in 1991. Thereafter, a lot of activities under the Mission were started. Considering the richness of Indian languages, it was decided to develop a corpus of three million words in each of the constitutionally accepted languages including Hindi in 1991. Accordingly the development of Hindi corpora was entrusted to IIT Delhi.The sources of Hindi corpora are printed books, journals, magazines, newspapers and government documents published during 1981-1990. It has been categorized into six main categories viz. Social Sciences, Physical & Professional Sciences, Aesthetics, Natural Science, Commerce, Official and Media Languages and Translated Material. Software Tools for word level tagging, Word Count, Letter Count,Frequency Count have also been developed.  About thirty lakh words of machine readable corpora have been developed in Hindi by various institutes.

    Apart from this, Hindi Word Processors have been developed by various Organizations starting form Siddharth (DCM in 1983), Lipi (Hinditronics 1983). ISM, l-leap, Leap Office (CDAC, Pune) since 1991 under development of GIST, Shreelipi, Sulipi, APS, Akshar and others so many word processors for Hindi. CDAC Pune pioneered the GIST Technology which facilitates the use of Indian languages in Information Technology. It uses the Indian Script Code for Information Interchange, their representation on Screen and Printer using the special fonts (ISFOC), common keyboard layout for different scripts (INSCRIPT) etc.

Job Opportunities in Hindi Language

    With the immense popularity and international importance of our national language, there is also a growing vista of employment in the field of Hindi language.In different departments of the Central government , State governments (in Hindi speaking States), it is mandatory to work in Hindi language. So there are various posts like Hindi Officer, Hindi Translator, Hindi Assistant, Manager (Official language) in different departments and units of Central / State governments.The opportunities have increased manifold with the advent of private TV and Radio channels and launch of Hindi versions of established magazines / newspapers. In the field of Hindi media, there is a need for Editors, Reporters, Correspondents, Sub Editors, Proof Readers, Radio Jockey, Anchors etc. A Degree / Diploma in Journalism / Mass Communication along with academic qualification in Hindi is an added advantage for job seekers. One can serve the mediums of Radio / TV / Cinema as a Script Writer / Dialogue Writer / Lyricist. This field necessitates a natural and artistic mastery of creative writing. But a degree / diploma in creative writing will enhance one’s style of writing.

    This includes translation of the works of eminent International writers into Hindi and also those of Hindi writers into English and other foreign languages. There is also the work of translating scripts of films / advertisements into Hindi/ English. But bi-lingual efficiency is the essence of this field. One can earn one’s livelihood as a freelance translator and can also set up one’s translation firms. Such firms take up assignments on contract basis and provide employment to many professional translators. There are also opportunities of translation projects from foreign agencies. The task can be easily done through internet.There are seemingly endless numbers of language companies all over the world like  Systran, SDL International, Detroit Translation Bureau, proz etc. The majority of these linguistically oriented companies offer many services available in multiple languages, and one of the languages is Hindi. Other companies solicit language services from these companies on contract basis. Usually, career opportunities in these firms are available in the form of permanent or freelance translators and interpreters.

    Now we find every global publication house struggling to make space for their existence in the masses, particularly the Hindi belt. Most surprisingly the leading multinational publishing houses not only started commissioning Hindi publication but started publishing translated version (in Hindi) of best sellers also on a massive scale. So there is  a great opportunity as a translator, editor & composer in big publishing houses.There is a job opportunity in foreign countries for the Post Graduates in Hindi language, especially those who have completed their Ph.D. Scope of teaching Hindi language and linguistics in foreign universities is increasing tremendously after it has been recognized as a language of business by some foreign countries. One can always choose the traditional option of teaching Hindi at schools, colleges & universities as teacher and professor in India

The above picture of the non-Hindi speaking student's trajectory in a typical

Hindi course makes evident the several levels of difficulties a new learner of the language is likely to experience. It also points the way to specific ingredients that must be incoprorated into a curriculum and pedagogy of Hindi for non-Hindi speaking learners as well as foreigners. Indeed, as in the meaningful teaching of any foreign language, it is a unique challenge to be able to introduce the language through a process that is not only enjoyable, but which in due course also leads to a systematic development of the use of Hindi. In this second part of the article I will draw upon my experience of teaching Hindi as a 'foreign language' to young learners to suggest some key principles on which to base a curriculum and pedagogy for Hindi as a new language. This exposition implictly draws upon persepectives from developmental psychology, linguistics, varied approaches to second and foreign language teaching, and the specificity of Hindi language.

A few years ago I made a transition from teaching Hindi as a foreign language to foreigner from various part of the world in Cenatral Institute of Hindi at Agra. Teaching Hindi to young forein scholars was a challenging task for me as teacher, I realized quickly, was not unlike teaching them what largely a ‘foreign’ language was. Two questions preoccupied me from the outset:

1. What would be the difference in the teaching approach if one were to teach a new language to young children of say 5-6 years of age as opposed to adults?

2. What would be the basic differences between teaching a new language as opposed to the mother tongue to first or second graders?

In exploring these questions I found myself gradually developing an approach to second language teaching that attempts to address the peculiar situation of a child just beginning to grapple with a new tongue. In this article I will share both an outline of the learning programme that emerged, and the process by which it took shape. I do this in the hope that my current experience in language teaching will have more general relevance to the teaching and learning of Indian languages in our schools where children often end up learning a second language other than their own mother tongue.Learning a language – for an adult and for a child has a big difference! In response to the first question, one of the things which struck me was that in most cases the adult chooses to learn the new language out of either interest in the culture, better job prospects or because he or she is planning to travel to that particular linguistic area. He or she is usually pressed for time and needs to achieve this goal in a relatively short span of time.

A young child, on the other hand, is usually in the unenviable position of having little choice in the matter. The new language that she is going to learn would probably not be of immediate and urgent use to her. But if she learnt it well, it would, I believe, deepen her sources of cultural contact and nourishment and also eventually serve practical communication needs with fellow Indians. However, though the child often does not have much choice regarding the second language she is going to learn, one thing that she does have in plenty is‘time’ to learn this language. Having established this much, I began to question the relevance of beginning to teach any new language, whether it be Hindi or Telugu or Tamil, to children through either a functional or a communicative approach (methods of language teaching that were most familiar to me as a teacher of French to adults). Could there not be another entry-point into a new language for a young child?

There are quit differences between Mother tongue learners and learners of a second or foreign language. As for the second question, I found myself facing a situation that was most perplexing. While it was evident that one was teaching essentially a new language to this young child, almost all the textbooks available for first and second graders were largely those that had been made for children whose mother tongue is Hindi. (Those made by the Dakshina Bharata Hindi Prachar Sabha for non-Hindi speakers are not specifically aimed at young children.)

All these questions came at a time when my own involvement with teaching Hindi as foreign language and I found myself transported into a world where the scholars surrounding me were themselves experimenting with language. For the second language learner and very young foreign, speaking a language was often synonymous with the pleasure of rolling sounds off their tongues. Most mothers would agree that babies babble when they are happy, and inversely, babbling itself gives them pleasure. Babies also perhaps notice that their babbling gives great pleasure to their caregivers. So they babble more. In time, they learn to copy sounds that they hear. They enjoy rolling these sounds off their tongue. They notice that this often brings forth applause and merriment among the social group they happen to be present in. So they do so even more, and suddenly, to the delight and surprise of everyone present, they say some meaningful sentence. And lo and behold, linguistic communication is born!

This observation of the linguistic behaviour of young children convinced me that language is clearly something that gives pleasure. There is something sensual about rolling a set of sounds to the cadence of any given language. Language is something that children often play around with. Even before babies learn the language, they pick up intonations of the particular language they are immersed in and use these intonations in their nonsensical babble. Later, toddlers and young children all over the world relish repeating nonsense rhymes of the kind: ‘I sent a letter to my friend...’ or ‘Oranges and lemons, sold for a penny...’. On such occasion’s language, I felt, is used by babies, toddlers and young children, not necessarily as a mode of communication, but as a means of play, play for deriving and giving pleasure.

This basic motive of pleasure in the use of a ‘tongue’ (in both the senses of the term) is often not explicitly recognized in most new-language teaching programmes. Most books or materials that set out to teach a new language have a grammatical¹, functional², or communicative³ approach. These approaches are very valuable and they have been used very successfully in teaching a new language, especially foreign languages such as French or English. But I came to feel that when we are teaching a new language whose script is also new to young children, these approaches could be deferred. Instead, the first year or so may be used largely to get the children to start enjoying rolling the new language off their tongues.

It is for this reason that the first level of language learning that I created was one that draws consciously on the pleasure derived in repeating rhythmic cadences of the language. It rests upon a series of short four-line rhyming poems, each one consisting of many words beginning with one particular letter of the alphabet. The ‘action’ of each rhyme is illustrated in detail to convey meaning through visual cues (see Figure). All letters of the alphabet (that are used at the initial position of words) are introduced individually in this manner. Repetition and singing out the rhymes, along with jigsaw puzzles and games - all activities belonging to the domain of ‘play’ - are incorporated into this first level. My initial idea in having children repeat and memorize these alphabet rhymes was not only to introduce the various letters of the alphabet, but also to create a memory bank of vocabulary and syntactic structures, which, while not necessarily appropriated fully by the child at this level, would serve as a reservoir in her later learning.

Words have a context, words are part of sentences with a principle that I felt was essential (drawing upon my experience of being a learner of French and subsequently a teacher of French to non-francophones) was that of introducing words in a context. Whereas most beginner texts for mother-tongue learners introduce letters through illustrated single words, in a second language programme, single words, standing forlornly alone, without a family of related words that comprise a meaningful phrase or sentence, are to be avoided. Vocabulary boxes preceding the ‘lesson’ serve little purpose, for the language can be internalized only in meaningful ‘wholes’ i.e. with words presented in a context. For I felt, whether or not the child acquires the syntax at the beginner stage, he would at the very least have been exposed to it through the teaching materials, and the syntax would then lodge somewhere deep in the recesses of memory. And I felt that one should not deny the child this kind of exposure on the grounds of a so-called need for ‘simplicity’.

But equally, I felt that the context and syntax presented should not be flattened out to the ‘here is a cat’ and ‘here is a mouse’ variety. As it turned out, the 50-odd rhymes - each depicting a distinct situation the child could relate to - provided a rich and varied context as well as syntax even at this early stage. The high pictorial content gave the child clues and helped him guess the approximate meaning of the rhyme. The pleasure of decoding a pictorial sequence that I have seen on the faces of some of my students certainly gave me the confidence that I was on the right track. The relatively complex syntactic structures presented by the rhymes would, in time, find a place in this child’s memory bank even if our objectives in the ‘here and now’ do not include the syntax.

And so we used this complete set of alphabet rhymes (including those for consonants and vowels) for one or two years in the Prep Section of Rishi Valley School. The children enjoyed repeating these rhymes. On the campus, one would sometimes hear them singing absent-mindedly ‘Ka se kaua kauvi ek..’ as they walked past or be reminded of the ‘Ja se jugnu’ rhyme when they saw a firefly. Teacher and parental feedback was positive.Yet, at a pedagogical level, one cannot remain content with the pleasure that a child displays in decoding pictorial clues, repeating the rhymes and eventually memorizing them. The principle of pleasure cannot be the sole motor of any pedagogical approach. As a teacher, I felt that there was a need to develop a definite progression of competencies, for a spiralling lesson structure where each new lesson refers back to the previous, brings new information and then joins up with the next. There was a need for reinforcement and a need for evaluation. The Rural Education Programme of the Rishi Valley Education Centre provided me with pointers as to how these holes could be plugged in the materials I was preparing and I borrowed freely from their rigorous and well-structured approach.

One of the principles used in the REC kit is to break down the content into small units of learning. Another is to have a certain specific series of activities in each of these units. I too decided to punctuate the long list of letters in the Hindi alphabet by grouping them into clusters and creating additional learning materials and activities along with each of these. Each cluster now contains 4-5 consonant rhymes and 1or 2 vowel rhymes. Accompanying these are bingo cards, flash cards, dictation texts and 2 types of evaluation worksheets, as well as a reading text.

The guiding principles for clustering the alphabets were based on instinct and what I considered commonsense: I wished to create small clusters of phonic units - consonants as well as vowels - whose combination would yield enough words to create a simple, short reading text. Another deciding factor was based on my experience of teaching Hindi to southern learners: I had found it an uphill task to get the students to pronounce the Hindi aspirates correctly, especially so when the non-aspirate and aspirate (for example, ‘ka’ and ‘kha’) consonant rhymes were introduced in the alphabetical order. Many of the children would cheerily repeat the ‘kha’rhyme as ‘ka se kargosh hai mera aaya; karbooze ka tukda kaya’... much to my dismay! Thus I resolved to introduce the aspirate and the nonaspirate forms as far apart in the progression of the course as possible.

Beginning to read, write and to understand is a big task for each and every language learner.The cluster then became the unit of teaching. Each cluster would contain reinforcement materials - bingo games for memory reinforcement of letters and words, flash cards for recall of nouns and the like. For evaluation of vocabulary and the spelling of words, simple ‘fill in the missing letters and maatras’ worksheets were devised. At the end of every cluster, a simple reading text consisting of words that were formed with the set of alphabets already introduced was also created. These reading texts have detailed pictorial support and the child is invited, with the help of the illustrations, to decode not just the script but also the meaning of hitherto unseen words. Though the mechanics of reading is one of the simplest tasks in Hindi, the script being phonetical to a very high extent, true reading implies an ability to comprehend what one can read. It was found that children had no difficulty in reading and understanding these texts that progressively incorporate an increasing range of letters. The reading material is followed by dictation tasks based on the principle of assonance - that is to say, the child is asked to write a series of words where at least one element, if not more, is common. This whole process simplifies the early dictation task enormously for children. And slowly, any fears or inhibitions of written work that may arise, ebb away.

Hindi presents a curious problem - all the Hindi nouns are either masculine or feminine. And the sentence structure – from the adjective to the verb – are entirely dependent on the knowledge of this gender. The new learner is faced with the daunting task of becoming acquainted with the gender of thousands of words. But how is he to learn this? To my knowledge, no method or approach had addressed this problem satisfactorily. Ultimately I felt that the only place to begin is at the very beginning. Thus the notion of gender of nouns was introduced right from the first lesson of the programme i.e. from the first rhyme that is learnt, so that the child learns the gender of nouns at the same pace as he becomes familiar with the nouns themselves. A simple pictorial logo in the form of a girl’s face and a boy’s face presented along with the noun seemed to suffice. After finishing the cluster, children would be asked to categorize these nouns by copying them out in two distinct columns in their notebook, one column for the ‘girl word’ and another for the ‘boy word’. But in the evaluation phase, one needed to test if the child had actually internalized the gender. This was done through another set of short exercises where the child had to fill in either ‘ka’ or ‘kee’, depending on the gender of the second word (eg: ‘naana kee nav’ and not ‘naana ka naav’). Thus without getting into the complexities of a complete sentence, one could verify whether the child had internalized the gender of the concrete nouns he had been introduced to.

Conclusion

In this manner, a first level of the programme to teach Hindi as a second language emerged through an observation of the difficulties involved in the existing scenario and the need to do something about it. A close involvement with children at home and at school, my own enjoyment in writing the little rhymes and the excitement of seeing children beginning to speak and read an entirely new language, all contributed to the process. This is, of course, only the first step in mastering Hindi. Work is now underway to further develop a course that will enable children to use the language with accuracy and confidence, while retaining the sense of enjoyment with which they began their journey into a new terrain.