How to use this book
For teachers and students using this book for your class and to learn on your own,
This book is a mixture of teaching and learning styles. It is meant to be used over two semesters as per the University schedules in the USA. The aim is to archive novice mid to novice high proficiency as per ACTFEL levels. There are interactive H5P activities and printable worksheets provided in each chapter. There are audio clips for students to listen to and learn vocabulary; these are sometimes presented as video clips with the vocabulary words as a slide and the audio of those words being read aloud. I use this material in my class, but supplement it with extra worksheets and activities on the D2L platform used by Michigan State University, which is very interactive and fun to use. Not all of these can be produced as H5P activities due to technical issues.
I encourage teachers to create and use more worksheets and other interactive activities in class to make the learning of Tamil more fun and easy for the students. The first chapter on alphabets and numbers itself will take three to four weeks to complete when complemented with the Conversation chapter. Vocabulary learning usually takes longer for the Novice learner. I encourage the teachers to accept the limitations of the student and help them be better learners. Wherever possible, both the written and spoken form of the language are given. As the students learn to read and write the language, it is essential that they learn the spoken form as well. Being a diglossic language, I encourage teachers to work on the spoken language at this level. Being inclusive of all kinds of dialects spoken in Tamil is necessary to include students from all walks of life and from all over the globe.
This book can be used in any order seen fit by the teacher and the students using this book. The first two parts of Chapter 6 can be taught/learnt after Chapter 1.
How I use this book:
I personally work on having my students gain reading, writing/typing, listening, and speaking skills. I also add cultural competence to this so that students travelling to Tamil Nadu and other Tamil speaking areas are aware of the cultural context and behaviors. I use the material covered in this book to teach two semesters of Basic Tamil. The semesters in the Universities in the USA are generally 15 to 17 weeks. This includes breaks, holidays, and exam weeks where there is no class. The classes usually meet anywhere between two-to-four times a week, and the progress on the class depends on these meetings. The rule of thumb in the USA is that if it is a three credit course, the students have three hours of meeting time with the teacher/instructor/professor and three hours of homework or assignments outside of class hours. Fully online classes, like the one I teach at MSU, are tech-enhanced and the students have activities to complete that are created on learning platforms like D2L or Canvas. I create and use a multitude of worksheets and interactive activities in class that cannot be included in this book as it will make it too long. I have given a breakdown of how long each chapter takes and the skills the students gain in each chapter.
This is my fifteen-week lesson plan for the novice learner in Basic Tamil 1.
The first chapter for alphabets and numbers takes three-to-four weeks to complete. I use various worksheets and D2L activities to make sure the students understand the different “N”s, “R”s, and “L”s in Tamil. It is important to teach the ழ ,ல ள variation as the meaning of the word changes if the wrong letter is used. The students are learning a new script that is different from English (Latin script) or Devanagari script, so it takes a while to make them comfortable in hand writing the letters and to get them started on typing them using a Tamil keyboard. I introduce a few parts from chapter 2 in week three and four to keep the class interesting and for the students to make progress in language learning. Depending on the students, I sometimes teach the first two parts of Chapter 6, telling time, including weeks, days, and months, at the end of this lesson plan.
The second chapter on Tamil conversation takes four-to-five weeks as we cover basic conversation skills. There is a lot of vocabulary learning involved in this part. I introduce lots of interactive activities as well as presentational activities as the students learn the basic speaking skills. Learning how to add suffixes and how case suffixes work in Tamil will take two weeks by itself. The use of “iru” takes one or two weeks depending on the students.
The third chapter on verbs is the most fun and usually takes only three weeks for the students to understand the tense rules in Tamil. I include various spoken, reading, writing, and listening activities in this lesson as well as some presentational activities.
The fourth chapter on family takes two weeks. That makes it 15 weeks. I usually keep aside a week for review before our final exam/presentation. At this point, students are able to make simple sentences and communicate at a novice level using vocabulary and learnt sentences.
I prefer to use weekly presentations and speaking activities in class to evaluate the students rather than texts.
This is my fifteen-week lesson plan for the novice learner in Basic Tamil 2.
Week one to three, we review material learnt in Semester 1. Week four, we start with Chapter 5. This chapter takes three weeks. Expressing likes and dislikes has a lot of cultural nuances that the students learn.
Week seven to nine are spent learning Chapter 6, everyday activities, and schedules. This chapter is filled with new vocabulary and differences in spoken and formal Tamil. Students practice all four skills and do interactive activity of sharing and receiving information from each other. They plan events comparing schedules and make up daily schedules that work for them in practical life.
Week ten to fourteen are used to learn about adverbs, adjectives and how to describe things. They learn about locations and giving directions. I use many interactive and presentational activities and many worksheets for this part. Week 15 is for review before finals.
Important note on spoken Tamil:
Spoken Tamil has various dialects that vary vastly from region to region. Socio-economic background, education, caste, and influence of language in neighboring states and in the country of the diaspora influence the spoken Tamil. A person who has lived in Tamil Nadu all their life and has not studied formal reading and writing will not know anything about the grammar of the language. There is a difference between a person who is fluent in the language and one who is educated in the language, a uneducated poor daily wage manual laborer from Tamil Nadu may be fluent in the dialect of Tamil he is grown up in, but will have no knowledge about the grammar or any reading and writing skills.
The spoken Tamil we learn in this book is the common dialect that we see in Movies, Television, and other official platforms. Social media now has multitude of dialects represented. Please remember that no one dialect is superior or inferior to another. Spoken Tamil in heritage families stems from the cultural practices and history of that family and must be respected and encouraged. No heritage student must be forced to speak a dialect that they are not comfortable with be it a personal or political reason. Especially heritage learners from Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and other South East Asian countries have been persecuted for their language in the county the are from since they were a linguistic minority, it is essential to support these learners and keep this spoken dialect of their heritage alive. With the advent of English and modernization, many dialects of Tamil are dying very quickly. It is indeed our duty to preserve the oral history and the cultural importance of these.
It is impossible to cover all the dialects of Tamil in a text book. Due to the diglossia in Tamil, we will need a separate book for spoken Tamil even to explain the small changes in the word and sentence patterns to students. I have provided this where ever I can. I have a chapter that explains the basic rules of morphology in spoken Tamil for the novice learners.
