Grappling With Less Commonly Taught Languages in a Stand-alone Master’s Program Print

Holly Gayley, University of Colorado, Boulder

Holly Gayley is assistant professor in the department of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she teaches courses on ritual, hagiography, gender, and ethics in Buddhism. In addition, Gayley oversees directed independent language studies in Tibetan at the University of Colorado and conducts private readings in Tibetan literature with Masters students. Her current research explores Buddhist modernism among Tibetan leaders in the People’s Republic of China, including the recent publication, “The Ethics of Cultural Survival: A Buddhist Vision for Progress in Mkhan po 'Jigs phun’s Heart Advice to Tibetans of the Twenty-first Century” in Mapping the Modern in Tibet (Sankt Augustin, Germany: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 2011). Gayley is also preparing a book manuscript on the lives and letters of a contemporary Tibetan couple, Khandro Tāre Lhamo and Namtrul Jigme Phuntsok, who played a significant role in reviving Buddhism in the region of Golok.

Tibetan Storytime as a New Pedagogy

At the University of Colorado, Boulder, we are pioneering a new pedagogy to bridge the gap between reading skills and listening comprehension in Tibetan language study. Typically, Tibetan language instruction is bifurcated into separate classes on classical Tibetan and colloquial Tibetan. The first delves into dense religious, philosophical, and historical texts, and the second focuses on general conversational skills related to everyday activities while traveling, such as ordering at a restaurant, asking for directions, or visiting a temple. But how does one learn to speak about texts in Tibetan? This is a crucial skill for any graduate student who seeks to combine textual and ethnographic research, or to work with Tibetan informants to clarify difficult points in textual sources. A language class that fosters listening comprehension and conversation skills about Tibetan literature is a distinctive approach, one that attempts to model a central activity in students’ future scholarly pursuits.

To bridge the gap between literary and spoken Tibetan, I designed a format for language classes taught by a native Tibetan speaker and longtime instructor, Lhoppon Rechung of the Mipham Shedra in Boulder, Colorado. The format is called, quite simply, “Tibetan Storytime.” Each semester, I select a set of readings according to the abilities and interests of the students, who already have some background in Tibetan literature but not strong colloquial language skills. These are primarily graduate students in our stand-alone Masters program in religious studies as well as PhD students in anthropology and geography, studying with my Tibetologist colleagues Carole McGranahan and Emily Yeh. I select from authentic materials for the readings, such as children’s books, collections of proverbs and folk tales, contemporary writings on Tibetan culture, guidebooks to religious sites, short biographies, and Tibetan songs. Each semester includes a range of topics and genres, increasing in difficulty and length as the weeks progress.

The format for each class meeting has several basic elements. To begin, Lhoppon Rechung reads the selection for the day, first slowly and then more quickly. This is recorded so that students can go back and review. Next, he goes through the text line by line, explaining it in colloquial Tibetan. This mimics the traditional Tibetan pedagogy of providing a commentary to religious texts, and Tibetan instructors — particularly those with a monastic background — are quite comfortable teaching this way. Depending on the level of the students, sometimes Lhoppon Rechung mixes in a bit of English to explain a challenging term, but otherwise the explanation takes place in Tibetan. During this part of the process, students have the opportunity to ask about the meaning of words or for clarification in his explanation (in Tibetan, of course). After the explanation is complete, students work in dyads on study questions to discuss what they have read. This provides a bridge between listening to a native speaker and formulating conversation, based on a shared lexicon from the reading. To conclude, Lhoppon Rechung retells the story in colloquial Tibetan. By this point, the students have already mastered the lexicon and have heard a colloquial explanation, so they can, by and large, understand his retelling and also begin to notice differences in the colloquial and literary versions of the story.


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.


Instruction in less commonly taught languages is one of the challenges in a stand-alone Master’s program. In a PhD program there may be advanced graduate students available to teach introductory-level language classes when there is no funding for a full-time instructor. For a stand-alone Masters program, however, this gap typically gets filled through faculty overload. In our religious studies department, our Hinduism professor, Loriliai Biernacki, had to offer introductory Sanskrit as an overload for several years until she created a consortium agreement with neighboring Naropa University. When I joined the faculty as the Buddhism professor in 2008, this agreement was already in place, so my students have been able to take first- and second-year Tibetan as well as Sanskrit at Naropa. But there is still a gap in their education since the Naropa class emphasizes classical Tibetan with minimal instruction in the colloquial language.

To fill this gap in an affordable way, the Tibetan class that I have described is run as an instance of Directed Independent Language Study (DILS). Inaugurated at Yale University, DILS is an innovative program to promote the study of less commonly taught languages, in which a small number of students are matched with a native speaker. Mark Knowles, the current director of the Anderson Language and Technology Center (ALTEC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has been a strong advocate of DILS — having come to ALTEC from Yale — and has supported Tibetan as one of the pilot languages in the program. Each instance of DILS costs approximately $2,500, which covers administrative and instructional costs for a semester. On such a shoestring budget, we have been able to offer DILS at the University of Colorado, Boulder, since 2009 with funding from three departments: anthropology, geography, and religious studies. I supervise the program, arranging the readings and attending class. It takes about the same time as an independent study, but nothing as onerous as teaching an overload course.

I still do private readings with students in order to prepare them for their Masters thesis. After two years of classical Tibetan, students are simply not yet capable of translating on their own. What results is an “assisted translation,” one in which the students receive considerable help to reach a polished translation. Nonetheless, the process allows them to experience what it takes to translate a text (or passage of a text) from beginning to end. This is a key step toward demonstrating their proficiency — not to mention grit and determination — in order to continue on to a PhD program.

The upshot is that after a year of DILS, supplemented by a modest amount of additional study on their own or through Naropa University, graduate students can qualify for a second-year colloquial language intensive over the summer. So far my students have favored the popular summer program at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Kathmandu, since they can also experience a cultural immersion, live with a Tibetan family, and begin developing contacts in their area of research. Only by qualifying for a second-year modern language program can students apply for a FLAS, or Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship, so in this way DILS provides another bridge for graduate language study.

As a supplement to other language study (coursework at other institutions, summer programs, and private readings), DILS can be extremely useful for a stand-alone Masters program in which students need to develop conversational skills in less commonly taught languages. And it can be especially effective with faculty input into the curriculum, based on the students’ needs in relation to the language in question. Of course it also depends on having native speakers available in the area. We are fortunate in Boulder to have a plethora of native Tibetan speakers and a handful of qualified language instructors. For those who are not so fortunate, an online format can serve as an alternative. At this point DILS Tibetan at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is a work in progress and only runs so long as we have sufficient student interest. In the meantime, we are developing a digital library of readings and recordings, based on Tibetan Storytime, that we hope to make available to the wider public at some point in the future.