South Asia Language Resource Center

[Harold F. Schiffman]

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Folks may be interested to know that we may soon have a new National
Language Resource Center, formed collaboratively by the National South
Asia Resource Centers (Title 6) in a proposal that was submitted on
Friday, authored by Jim Nye at Chicago.  The proposal can be viewed and
downloaded from this site:

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/southasia/lrc/603.pdf

Penn will be the major site for the focus on materials development. About
$200k per year will come to Penn to be distributed in various ways; aside
from some salaries and other administrative expenses, other amounts for
grants to people who apply for funding to construct modules of various
sorts for various languages, skill levels, etc.  I've set up a page that
describes how we'll plan for this at:

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/pedagog/salarc/overallplan.html

We will probably start with some get-togethers of the various language
groups in S. Asia (e.g. all the Hindi people, all the Telugu people) to
discuss what the priorities are, and get people to agree on what the
priorities are, for what skills, what levels etc.  We'll also use this to
introduce and discuss issues of pedagogy and technology.

As we all know, money for and attention to S. Asian languages has been
minimal for the last few decades, and there's been little new growth, no
permanent jobs, or new anything for quite a while.  We will have funding
for a summer institute (to be held at Wisconsin) where as many S. Asian
languages as possible will be taught; there will also be some workshops
for teachers, to help bring them up to speed on new developments in
pedagogy, and especially on how to construct materials for the web. The
whole approach now will be to have stuff on the web that will be
integrated, (meaning that there won't be gaps, or discontinuities between
this module and that module) and all Centers (or anybody anywhere in the
world) can access them and use them.  Perhaps these workshops will be held
in conjunction witht the Wisconsin summer program, or perhaps they will be
held elsewhere, e.g. at Penn.  Not clear yet.

If the funding comes through (and we have every reason to believe it will)
it won't be until late August/September, so nothing much can be done at
this point in time.

Hal Schiffman