Instructor: Jennifer Dubrow
Email: jdubrow@u.washington.edu
Office: 250 Gowen Hall
Office Hours: W, F 10:30-11:20 AM and by appointment
Course Website: http://faculty.washington.edu/jdubrow

The goal of Hindi 431 is to enable students to develop speaking proficiency in modern standard Hindi beyond their level at the start of the quarter. We will engage in a variety of activities designed to improve grammatical accuracy, fluency, pronunciation and general speaking ability. These activities will include memorizing and reciting scripted conversations; grammar and comprehension drills; oral presentations; listening comprehension exercises; taped pronunciation exercises; and unscripted conversation. In all of these activities our goals will be to improve accuracy and fluency, and to avoid "break-downs" in conversation where the student feels unable to communicate. The emphasis in this class, as compared to other Hindi classes, will be on conversational Hindi, employing a mixed vocabulary and including interjections, idiomatic expressions, polite discourse, and conversation stoppers/starters where appropriate. General strategies for speaking Hindi, such as attention to verbs and phrasing, and increased use of indirect constuctions and emphatic participles, will also be discussed.

For Winter Quarter 2008, we will continue most of the activities practiced in Autumn Quarter 2007, namely memorizing scripted conversations, grammar and comprehension drills, oral presentations and listening comprehension exercises. However, this quarter we will shift focus to more unscripted conversations on various topics, largely selected by students. For these unscripted, situational conversations, students will first memorize lists of vocabulary relevant for the topic or situation chosen and then engage in role-play and guided conversation in class sessions. Listening comprehension materials will sometimes be incorporated into these sessions. In addition, this quarter we will invite 3-4 guest speakers to the class to speak on various subjects. This will give us the opportunity to engage with different Hindi speakers as well as learn about topics related to Hindi language and literature.