The Central Institute of Indian Languages is concerned with the development of Indian languages. The development of Indian languages can take place by their use in new domains, which requires development of materials and methods and manpower for work in the areas of codification, standardisation and modernisation. The work of the Institute encompasses basic research, material production and inservice training. The Institute is also entrusted with the responsibility of assisting and improving the teaching of Indian languages at various levels by developing new methods, models and materials and by making use of modern technology. The six Regional Language Centres are engaged in regular language teaching programmes. The Institute is also a clearing house of information relating to Indian languages.
The major area of activity of the Institute and its Regional Lauguage Centres is training second language teachers and production of second language teaching materials in Indian languages. Most of the available materials are meant for speakers of foreign languages learning Indian languages. The materials prepared by the Institute are for Indian learners. These materials are methodologically different because of shared linguistic features between Indian languages at all levels. The training programmes and teaching materials exploit these commonness between Indian languages. These materials are prepared in different media like print, film, audio cassettes, video cassettes and computer softwares.
The present volume is the first of the 3 levels of teaching materials. used for graduate teachers trained in the Regional Language Centres in a 10 month training programme to teach a modern Indian language as a third language under the Three Language Formula. These teachers do not speak natively the language they learn. The intensive course is for instruction in the first level consisting of 3 months of intensive learning supplemented by language laboratory sessions. The materials are organised and graded on the basis of structures and reinforcement is through structural drills and exercises.
Urdu is being taught as a second language to the non-cognate group of learners at the Northern Regional Language Centre, Patiala since 1971 and to the cognate group of learners at Urdu Teaching and Research Centres at Solan since 1973 and at Lucknow since 1985. There has been hardly any other serious attempt for teaching and learning of this language as a second/foreign language earlier. As a result, only a limited number of pedagogically oriented materials in the form of language courses and supplementary materials have been produced so far.
1) To identify, discriminate and produce Urdu speech sounds in their meaningful sequences.
2) To form sentences orally from given patterns and lexical items.
3) To converse with their teachers and fellow trainees on specified topics under controlled situations.
4) To narrate specified events and topics.
5) To read simple and graded passages with comprehension.
6) To write simple sentences and guided compositions on specified topics.
Before achieving the above mentioned objectives, the intensive course is to be followed by using the phonetic drills given in the Urdu Phonetic Reader and by learning Urdu script through An Introduction to Urdu Script: Reading and Writing. The learners generally take about 20 clock hours of instruction in learning the script.
Each lesson consists of text in the form of narration or dialogue which is followed by vocabulary, drills, exercises and notes on grammar. The drills and exercises reinforce and evaluate the teaching items introduced in the lesson for the first time. They are listed in the order they occur in the lesson. The meanings are generally restricted to the context in which they occur in the lesson.
Drills are provided for the practice of the structure and teachable items introduced in the text. They enable the learner to internalise and reinforce the structures and teachable items introduced in the lesson. The types of drills introduced in the lessons are repetition, substitution, transformation, build up and expansion. The main types of exercises used in this book are: ifill in the blanks using suitable words, answer questions, use the given words and phrases in sentences. The drills and exercises are organised in such a manner that they help in the development of learners' linguistic competence in the language systamatically.
Notes on grammar have been given usually after a particular grammatical structure is introduced at the end of the lesson. The notes are provided from the functional point of view and the use of technical terms is kept to the minimum. A word index is given at the end of the book as an appendix and the words are listed alphabetically.
General suggestions The lessons designed in this book are generally based on structural approach in which there is an emphasis on the pattern practice. Keeping in view the linguistic background of the learners and appropriateness of actual language teaching and learning situation, a teacher may use an eclectic approach that integrates various techniques found in different language teaching methods.
The basic course aims at developing all the basic skills of the language, i.c.,listening, speaking, reading and writing. A teacher has an important role to play in achieving the objectives of the course. A teacher has to provide himself as a good model of the spoken language to the learners. Students are likely to imitate the teacher's pronunciation to the maximum possible. He has to help his students to acquire an acceptable pronunciation of the target language. The learner must acquire the skill of listening before he attempts to speak. He should be able to listen with clear understanding. Once the learner is able to recognise different speech sounds, words, utterances, he has to develop the skill of speaking as accurately as possible following a good model. Besides providing articulatory description of individual speech sounds, providing the learners with clear listening, a teacher may use language laboratory lessons for clear listening and imitation of speech.
The skill of reading will involve mastering of different types of this skill, i.e., loud reading and silent reading with comprehension. Besides the text of lessons, a selection of supplementory reading material will be required for developing this skill. A teacher may select interesting and informative passages for this purpose. For increasing the speed in reading, a learner must be able to employ different techniques of reading like skimming, scanning etc. for different types of reading materials.
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