Critical Languages Training at SCPS
Twenty-Two Take Summer Workshop for Teachers of Hindi and Urdu
According to the Modern Language Association, more high school and college students are taking foreign language courses—up nearly 18 percent between 1998 and 2002 alone. And these students aren’t just studying Spanish, French, or German. They are wading into non-European tongues, many of which have figured in the news lately from such places as Mumbai and Islamabad.
The only problem, as the National Foreign Language Center reports, is finding enough people trained to teach these “criticalneed foreign languages.”
In response, the U.S. government two years ago began to fund StarTalk Summer Institutes at colleges and universities. Among last summer’s trainees were 22 who attended an NYU-SCPS workshop on teaching Hindi and Urdu. A $62,000 grant from the National Security Language Initiative covered the costs of the intensive 10-day program. It was designed for native Hindi and Urdu speakers, with or without previous teaching experience.
NYU Professor Gabriela Ilieva working with the SCPS Star Talk program students on an inclass project to create lesson plans. The exercise challenged students to think about teaching vocabulary, Indian or Pakistani customs, and related language use through the lens of a social occasion, such as a birthday party.
“Ideally, we wanted people who already had taught at the high school or college level or people who were currently teaching another subject,” says Milena Savova, director of the SCPS program in Foreign Languages, Translation, and Interpreting. The School currently offers 26 foreign languages, as well as specialized programs, such as a medical interpreting certificate and an online Arabic-to-English translation certificate.
One of last summer’s attendees was Laju Shah, an Indian American who’d spent several years teaching at elementary and middle schools in San Francisco, her hometown. She knew some Hindi, but was weak on grammar.
“I was ready for a career change,” Shah says. “I was tired of being just a classroom teacher. I wanted to specialize, to be a Hindi teacher.”
Like others in the summer workshop, she praised its balance of theory and practice—a curriculum developed in close collaboration with the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the NYU College of Arts and Science and the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. NYU Professor Gabriela Ilieva, a teacher of Hindi, helped to develop and co-taught the program.
Rajni Bhargava, a student, recalls the attention given to fundamentals—developing syllabi and class plans, basic teaching skills, and how to be effective in a classroom setting. New Delhi born and a native speaker of Hindi (as was most of the class), Bhargava had done a little “informal” teaching—lessons given on the weekend to neighbors’ children. But nothing like what she learned at SCPS.
“After the lectures each day, we broke up into groups of three or four to work up the assigned projects,” she says. “And then we had to present them to the class. It was a little scary at first, but everybody was really, really supportive.”
The close-knit classmates had a reunion in October, where they compared notes on what’s happened to them since completing the summer program. A number reported they’re putting their SCPS lessons to good work in the classroom.
In fact, two of the students—Shah and Bhargava—are back at NYU for the spring semester as teaching assistants in Hindi classes, and another student is scheduled to teach an Urdu class at SCPS.