Session 11, Room B, Presentation 11 2023 FL OER Conference

so our next speaker Rajiv ranjan from Michigan State University and as we see his talk his topic is basic Urdu so Rajiv thank you Carl um thanks for the opportunity uh as you can see it's another open education resource textbook and I'm assistant professor at Michigan State University in linguistics languages and culture I have a PhD in second language that Christian and I teach Hindi and Urdu that's my humble introduction to my cohorts here a wonderful presentation man CG and and those who are listening to uh my presentation right after Man City you would see that several of her thoughts has been Incorporated and where she divorced from me is talking specifically about the Heritage language Learners which in South in South Asian context is little bit different because it's like 1800 different languages and the Learners could be cultural heritage versus linguistic educated so what C is planning to do is to work on the linguistic Heritage where my book is considering Heritage even as a cultural heritage and stuff like that so there's a little bit advances for sure forwarding our field forward so kudos to one CG so challenges that as I have only lightning moments and as everybody can see that you can always approach me and write to me um so you know before I move forward um I okay I'll send the link of my book later on and you can also in abstract you can access the book from the abstract so the challenge is that I started this project and this is this was my second oer project after basic Hindi and Hindi and Urdu is the same language with a different script and little bit when you go to the advanced level the the context from the Islamic background and and the vocabulary can change but grammatical structure and everything is the same is this India got divided in 47 in India and Pakistan and India does not have a national language whereas Pakistan made Urdu has a national language and those who are not linguist or in linguistics training they do not have this idea that Hindi Urdu is the same language with two different script so the challenges that I have when I thought this project out is that how um like the difference teaching methodology but then I also have to see who are my audience and the audience was my Hindi Urdu Learners or Urdu Learners and Urdu teachers in America who are not like Spanish and in the morning I saw a wonderful presentation on Spanish in group b and how they are promoting more which is based base work is done unfortunately for Less commonly taught languages we are me Mansi and people like us are developing That Base so bear with us if our presentation and our project look very archaic in terms in comparison with the commonly taught languages other thing was um how it could be friendly at asynchronous and synchronous because these projects came just right before the covet pandemic hit so we were in an aggressive need of the online material that we are not just scanning things and putting it there and how does it approach to the hate is a non-heritage language Learners I don't want to waste time on this slide but what really fascinates me about this definition is its online learning content software Tools circumulative digital curricula and there's no restriction of copyright but we as the author of these books we have to go through all this training and Carl rightly said that the session was really helpful and I definitely struggled before this oer uh conferences for last three years that we are doing it has been a challenge for the developers like us um my journey actually started off oer in 2016 when I collaborated on a melon Grant with Sango Kong from University of Minnesota Sunil Bhatt from British Columbia myself and lakhan gusa at that time he was teaching Hindi at Syracuse and we came up with the Hindi Urdu intermediate level textbook which is still available online Link is here but these are the three solo project that I did afterwards basic Hindi one came in 2021 basic Urdu came in 2022 and we just finished basic person which is under the copy editing within our MSU library of oer part of that and they do the copy editing and check all the copyrights check all the accessibility and stuff and hence we have a basic person which I'm a co-author with my colleague nahid Siran who teaches personal language at MSU when we are thinking about the design consideration the traditional versus modern and as I said we are being the the as a first author of any less commonly taught languages at least in Hindi Urdu or South Asian we I had to think about how modern I could be is my audience ready for the very modern approach of language teaching and can teaching materials interact with the learner because we are thinking about online and we all understand that how the zoom as we are presenting no one's video is on and everybody is just using the materials at their home so can the materials interact with them um and and can be what should be our proficiency goal can we gamify the situation and as a SLS training myself I understand the importance of gamification because in school there's people or the kids learn their Spanish and French and all the commonly taught languages they have amazing tools and all but then they come to college and try to learn Hindi Urdu or South Asian languages and that kind of of a coolness is gone so I wanted to add little bit of a coolness part in that in in this game too so what I did I did the mixed approach and what I believe is a post pedagogical approach which does not really Define yourself in one pedagogy it depends on you can adapt or adopt of whatever the pedagogical approach the certain teacher in a certain context they are so as a author of the book myself I wanted to be somewhere vague so that everybody can use a little bit part of it so that we can have a very solid foundation pedagogical approach you can see that there's a Heritage and non-hate is kind of a style like top down and bottom up but in these all kind of Kagan and Dylan's ideas of 2001 they very smartly skip the grammar person and in Hindi Urdu as as Mansi also little bit suggested about oblique form I wanted to make it clear that in in a languages there are interpretable feature which makes the sense or which adds to the semantic value of the language and that's really okay to teach you know in a very communicative way but if there are uninterpretable feature which does not have any semantic value Learners should go get the fossilized if they are not taught explicitly or they are not little bit paid extra attention to those things so with that in mind I try to build the book that you can use deductively or inductively implicitly or explicitly um that little bit of a theater background I came up with the socio-cultural theory which definitely is one of proximal development so the chapter progressed in that way interactionism that not only between the speakers and and Learners and teachers but but between the materials and the Learners themselves and and hence I landed up between the social interactions approach of um as a theoretical framework of my textbook the structure is uh there are eight chapters first chapters begins with the the script which is non-roman script so hence it is important for us to kind of focus on that but two to eight chapters are based on the different themes and a sample here you can see that the review of the previous section and then two to three readings and a study abroad because that component component was really important because due to kovid my Learners were not going to study abroad so I wanted to kind of include some some sort of immersion experience and then there is a follow-up grammar so if you are teaching in a different modality you can start with the grammar and then expose to the input flooding or you can have an input flooding and if some teachers themselves want to clarify some grammar points or some students really want to get into the grammar points they can also access that part and there was at the end there was a cultural notes um you can see some of the pre pre-reading examples it's literally task based but I kind of cater p and post reading and listening and each reading has the video uh that we have created with the subtitles and all for the accessibility and then there is a h5p material that you can drag and drop and self-evaluate yourself and this is accessible on a phone too so you see that this slide you'll see that there's a whole bunch of words written there and then there's a conversational style and this is to kind of finder in the in the middle somewhere for the Heritage those who can go top down and for non-heritage which can go on which can go bottom up so that kind of I try to mix and match um you can see the recording h5p gives an amazing tools for asking students or Learners to record and share that with either the teachers or Advanced learner or with their kind of language Partners in in that manner um I kind of gamified the vocabulary too you can drag and drop to the true false and so I kind of because we have less time I wanna I'm not going much in details but these are the other topics that we are working like Advanced Indonesian with the collaboration of University of Michigan I finished basic Hindi basic Kamai I helped my my colleague and and all these projects I supervise here at MSU with my uh friend who is a coordinator of less commonly taught languages Daniel Schneider we are working on basic Turkish basic Urdu that I finished basic who's back we have basic Vietnamese is is done an intermediate in intermediate Hindi is ongoing process I wanted to share this analytics that since when I finished basic Urdu you can see that how many school teachers and and other universities teachers are using that and it gives me every week or every 15 days a kind of analytics on MSU website and I'm very proud to share that I have more than uh 497 visitors and total page view is more than thousand and and in the same stroke if I can say Hindi which is the year old now it has more than 3000 people using this book on a regular basis um I want to acknowledge my oer of MSU team a senior studies program at MSU my own little less commonly thought language program and my department of linguistics languages and culture and this is me if you want to talk more about this project or uh kind of ask me any question I'm here but I'll let me share the Urdu book link here with you also that was my presentation thank you I'm open for questions thank you so I just want to ask people to write their questions in the chat and I guess I have a question for um I guess we have a little bit of time for both of you yeah Rajiv you were mentioning uh the issue of Heritage language Learners are a little bit different in South Asia than let's say you you mentioned Spanish language Learners yeah um so oftentimes people talk about Heritage language Learners as um suffering from a lot of linguistic insecurity Muncie did mention of course the many differences between foreign language Learners and but is that also is that the case in both both Urdu and in Hindi that they have a lot of this kind of linguistic insecurity um so let me share my thoughts and Mansi can add more to that so my understanding and there is a paper actually written call on that by uh a wonderful scholar of South Asia Gabriela Nick at NYU and uh Surendra gambhir and they kind of classified Heritage language Learners in four different parts so one is linguistic Heritage cultural heritage and the generational Heritage so um what kind of demography we have in at least in Midwest that I can tell I'm at Midwest um which could be very different from the East Coast or West Coast or elsewhere but demography that we have that we have Earth there are five main language family in India and South Asia and if somebody is coming from the dravidian language family for example Tamil Telugu Malayalam kannada speaker they have no understanding whatsoever how the indo-aryan languages which Hindi Urdu Punjabi Gujarati Bengali would work right so they are cultural heritage but the Bollywood is the lingua Francais in many ways so they understand some words so they are not only like the the linguistically not confident but there are also some most of the time when I when we do the placement test of course like before we place our student with the Heritage student and so typically I'll place them in a second year or three four weeks they can come in first year and learn the script and move on but um but it's a challenge it's a real Challenge and given that little is so small we cannot create like a two separate stream at the University that hey we have seven students non-heritage and seven students in Heritage that will not be cost effective yeah thank you yeah um um Rajiv has already um talked about it mostly but then um yeah I'll just add a little to it that um well it very much depends on like you know what kind of background it comes from uh which tells how confident um or in what insecurities they're gonna have about their languages I definitely since you know ever since I started teaching I have taught Heritage track consistently and then I have students in my class who are very proud that they speak uh you know whatever dialect or variety of language they speak versus sometimes as students who are not at all comfortable or like you know they're they they feel like that the dialect they speak is not the right one or is something wrong with it and then they want to come to the class to learn foreign to learn the formal language and um the best way to like in my experience address that is by giving them acknowledgment that actually all of it is still Hindi like whatever dialect or variety that they may be speaking right by showing them representation of their dialect or their variety um in Bollywood or like in literature and so on and um and then taking from there like building on the language we we're in Heritage track the whole thing is about building on what they already have and like starting from where they already are instead of like you know um assuming that they all come with like no knowledge or like similar knowledge um they do have I mean if you compare to foreign language Learners it's very different but then within themselves they have so much variety because everyone there could be some speakers of good like somebody could be fluent in Gujarati and that's how they speak some Hindi some could somebody could be fluent in Punjabi and that's why they have some Hindi or somebody could just be fluent in English but then they have some Hindi from their parents talking in it so yeah so and even linguisticated Mansi if I can add like they are vocabulary wise they're okay but you will see Punjabi speaker adding the Hindi sentence and ending the word with the Punjabi verb to be and and you you are you're a little bit unsure like should I correct it like how far we can do with the zone of proximal development is the right time to give a corrective feedback or am I kind of ruining their confidence of interrupting them because it is Meaningful so most of the Heritage to an even linguistic hate is what they are struggling called is with the as I said in my presentation is an interpretable features and my PhD is on uninterpretable features on on language acquisition not just on Hindi but across the world languages like how can like as a second language learner of English itself I write things and I and my wife who is a native English speaker she corrects me like one thing like your article the is misplaced you never use it when it is required and you use it when it is not required but because we don't have the idea of of definiteness Hindi Urdu has idea of a specificity and which does not have any semantic value in our language right so those are the things that Learners at the Heritage level that language Learners are definitely struggling yeah um I have a follow-up question for Rajiv about um you've produced a lot of oer so you you showed a picture a slide of your different books um and so I wanted to ask about the context of Michigan State then because I know that you also mentioned them you have a melon Grant so the first book I had is a melon Grant but uh so this is the Hindi book that I wrote uh I sent a link again this is one year or one and a half years old so when oer Library started and I got a grant to write the Hindi book and then Asian studies Muslim studies and all those different centers get really interested and I was the advocate of less commonly taught languages and even in this conference my Arabic colleagues are presenting in group a right now uh my Chinese colleague is presenting so three or four of us from MSU those who are working on open education resources and we in many ways we are we are trying to produce more oer because in Spanish uh kind of morning session there it is like I can't remember that but in in one presentation it was mentioned that how it is also an outreach program because Learners are learning language and it's cost effective they don't have to buy textbook but in that way we can bring the coolness too like you know Learners can say like hey we don't have to spend eighty dollars or a hundred dollars on textbook and it is gamified or so in that way it is like MSU in many ways a leader and not only that let me add this at MSU I am also a mentor of Fulbright language teaching assistant and I have two all different foreign language teaching assistant and a project that we started is uh culture so Hindi culture and every FLT every year their job is to kind of write two section for beginner intermediate and advanced level in on interactive interpretive interpretive and production sort of a theme and at four or five years we'll have 12 different book which is just focused on cultural aspect or on open education resources oh okay we've got title six so yeah yeah yeah so Michigan State's On The Rise and I'm glad that you've been focusing so much on oer and I think it makes so much sense obviously for the little context um that is underserved by publishing publishing companies yeah thank you for both vote to both of you um our next