Marijana Janjić, Indian Cultural Centre, Zagreb

Hindi teaching: question of focus?

Learning a new language requires focus as it is time and energy consuming investment that also takes its toll on the person’s finances. Hence, one ought to come into the foreign language classroom already aware of the benefits one seeks from acquiring communication skills in a new language. If a student in a classroom doesn’t know why he/she is there, the process of acquiring new skills can be and usually is dampened for a lack of desire to master new data and for a lack of curiosity to understand a civilization, a culture, which ever way we choose to name it. However, students are only partially responsible for the outcome as teacher(s) share the responsibility as well as desire to master new learning styles of their students and a curiosity to understand both the needs of their students and the purpose of the course they facilitate.

Learning/teaching of Hindi is dampened by different attitudes that take root in students/teachers prior to classroom experience: a) everybody speaks English in India, b) I don’t really need Hindi attitude, c) Hindi is useful only for watching Bollywood films today, d) I can learn Hindi from anyone, e) I don’t need to learn the script, f) teaching/learning materials for Hindi are not interesting, g) my students are here only to pass time and exams, h) my students don’t really need Hindi.

The paper analyses the need for teacher’s effort to recognize students’ learning styles and adjust his/her teaching style in order to help students achieve their learning goals. Thus the focus in teaching/learning is shifted from abstract curriculum plans to the cross-section of curriculum plan(s) and students’ needs. Paper gives examples of how students and teachers can develop mutual interest in their respective work/goals from which new materials and new approaches to teaching/learning Hindi can spring up.