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Grappling With Less Commonly Taught Languages in a Stand-alone Master’s Program - Why Literature in a Colloquial Language Class? PDF-NOTE: Internet Explorer Users, right click the PDF Icon and choose [save target as] if you are experiencing problems with clicking. Print

As a pedagogy for foreign language acquisition, Tibetan Storytime follows recent advocates of “processing input” by reading and listening to the target language over and above “practicing output” (Lightbown, Halter, White, and Horst, 2006). In this model the endless drills on grammatical forms are abandoned in favor of guided learning activities. There is something intuitive about this approach, which steers the classroom dynamic away from memorization and reproduction to a more spontaneous engagement. In Tibetan Storytime, the instructor Lhoppon Rechung improvises his explanation while the students focus on listening comprehension, building on their existing reading skills, and interjecting questions as needed. Rather than being focused on repetitive drills, conversation flows from what is heard and read.

Authentic Tibetan language materials, including literary texts, have proven to be helpful as a focal point for discussion in the language classroom for several reasons. First and foremost, authentic materials have a real-life basis rather than being artificially generated for the sole purpose of language study. For this reason, they reflect the idiosyncrasies of discourse in the target language. In addition to building language skills through vocabulary and grammar, authentic materials can help students develop the cultural knowledge necessary for intercultural understanding and communication (Aghagolzadeh and Tajabadi, 2012). As a result, the focus for the language classroom becomes communicative and cultural competence rather than the mastery of grammatical forms.

Beyond this, literary texts can stimulate student interest and provide fodder for discussing ideas and opinions. This is especially true for graduate students who already bring a high level of commitment to the culture under study and benefit from a wide exposure to it through diverse subjects and literary genres. Since our Tibetan classes have included graduate students from religious studies as well as anthropology and geography, their disparate interests naturally prompt a variety of sources for the reading list each semester. After an initial foray into children’s stories and folk tales, our topics have spanned from descriptions of holidays and rituals to religious songs of experience and guidebooks to sacred sites. As a type of authentic material, literary texts have the added advantage of breaking down the typical separation between the domains of literature and colloquial language, a bifurcation not unique to Tibetan but symptomatic of the language classroom historically.

In Tibetan Storytime, I also found authentic materials to be useful for dealing with students at multiple levels of language skill, ranging from the beginner to intermediate level. While a total beginner could not stay afloat in a class centered on literary texts, students with a solid foundation have been able to engage the readings at whatever level their comprehension allows. Those stronger in colloquial Tibetan rely more heavily on the oral explanation in order to understand the text, while those stronger in literary Tibetan rely more heavily on the written text as an anchor to understand the oral explanation. Either way, students are expanding their skill set and noticing the ways that oral usage diverges from the structure of a written text and vice versa.

The same flexibility to deal with different language levels does not occur in an approach based on grammar lessons and functional conversation, where repetition can be deadening and pacing issues can become problematic if the gap between levels among students is too wide. With literary texts, the differences are less pronounced, since everyone is encountering the text for the first time. What’s more, the diverse topics keep the discussion lively for everyone. Who has studied the technical vocabulary for smoke purification offerings? No one has yet. We were all gripped by Lhoppon Rechung’s explanation, including the faculty present — in this case Emily Yeh and me. In a moment like this, the classroom pretext fades away and suddenly the students are reading a text with a native informant. They are not just learning how one should do this essential scholarly activity; they are doing it already.



 

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