Publications

Teaching Telugu to Freshman Students at a U.S. University

V Rao Vemuri
University of California, Davis

Brief Biography

Born in Chodavaram and raised in Tuni by his parents, Smt. Sitaramamma and Someswararao, Dr. Vemuri Venkateswararao is educated in Tuni, Machilipatnam, Kakinada, Detroit and Los Angeles. He is now a professor of Computer Science, University of California, Davis. He has written several books, published well over hunderd research papers and supervised many students.

He has written extensively in both Telugu and English, both fiction and non-fiction and is committed to the cause of popularizing science. His writings are published both in India and U. S. A. Among the many books published by him, his English-Telugu and Telugu-English Dictionary and Thesaurus (Asian Educational Services, New Delhi) is unique and one-of-a-kind aimed at providing one-word equivalents. An on-line version of this is available at http://www.sahiti.org/dict/index.jsp where one can compare Brown's and Vemuri's dictionaries side by side.

In addition to several awards and honors he has received, University of California has honored him with the Distinguished Public Service Award in 1997.

Prolog

During the Spring Quarter of 2003, I taught an introductory Telugu course at the University of California, Davis. For the past three/four years the university has been experimenting with the concept of what are called Freshman Seminars and the Telugu course was offered as a part of this seminar series.

The Freshman Seminars, as the name suggests, was aimed at incoming Freshman class. Each seminar is a one or two credit course. (A regular course gets typically 3 or 4 credits.) A one credit course meets once a week in a 50 minute session and a two credit course meets for two sessions. It is up to the instructor to choose between these two options. Because the course carries a letter grade, rather than a Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grade, there is some incentive for the students to work hard and take the course seriously.

The University strongly encourages, to the point of arm-twisting, all incoming Freshman to take one or two of these seminars. The purpose of these seminars is to expand the intellectual horizons of the students by giving them an opportunity to explore all sorts of subject areas. Faculty are strongly encouraged to participate in this adventure. Participating faculty are expected to teach these courses above and beyond their normal teaching loads and participation is voluntary. There is nothing like a typical topic. I have seen courses like "Vegetarianism," "Energy and Environment," "Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control," to name a few. One's imagination is the limit

In my thirty years of teaching experience, I taught mostly graduate level courses, all of them in the College of Engineering. Only recently I began to teach undergraduate classes; that too at the upper division level. Intrigued by the thought of teaching a Freshman class, I volunteered – three years ago - to teach a Freshman Seminar. I taught a course called "Science and Religion." In retrospect, it was a mistake to tackle a "heavy" subject like this. Some students thought that I was trying to teach them religion!

After a couple of years of hiatus, with certain trepidation, I offered to teach, "An Introduction to Telugu." The administration was not opposed, but I did not sense any overt enthusiasm. My proposal went back and forth for revisions. The administration persuaded me to go easy on the language part and dilute the course a bit by talking about Indian culture also. In other words, they felt – I thought - that it would be more useful if I put less emphasis on teaching the language and more useful if I focus on the culture.

Goals of the Course

It has always been my desire to teach the language, not the culture. Fearing that my proposal would be rejected, I acquiesced. After all these revisions, the final statement of goals boiled down to the following.

• Learn about Language Families of the World
• Learn about the similarities and differences between languages (at least between English, Telugu and other Indian languages)
• Develop an appreciation for the relation between a language and a culture
• Develop an "ear" for Telugu: i. e., an ability to recognize and identify Telugu by looking at the script and by listening to conversations.
• Develop an ability to read and write Telugu alphabet
• Develop an ability to read and write simple Telugu words and recognize their relationship to Sanskrit and English
• Develop an understanding of the literary wealth of India in all its multitudes of languages.

Thus the outline included a discussion of the language families of the world, Indo-European family, Indic language sub family, Dravidian languages and the presence of Dravidian languages in Afghanistan (to lend an air of contemporary relevance). To lighten the atmosphere, I strove to include tit-bits about Telugu and some of the more talked about features of Telugu (Italian of the East, its place in Karnatic music, its ability to absorb alien words with ease, JBS Haldane's opinion about Telugu as the most suitable, among Indian languages, for scientific discourse, etc.). I also included a basic comparison of Indian languages (really the comparison boils down to Sanskrit, Telugu and Tamil) in terms of their script and grammar. There was some discussion on how words from Sanskrit and English found their way into Telugu and how a student can fearlessly speak Telugu with more than 50% English words in the speech.

Kavitha Vemuri asking a question after the class. The onlooker is Priya Mitty.
 

Course Outline

The original outline, which is more than I could cover, is shown below. Items I could not cover due to time constraints are indicated. The hyperlinks point to locations in the class web site (http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~vemuri/freshman/index.html).

1. Introductory Material
• The Language Map of the world (HTML)
• Languages of the World and Indo-European and Dravidian language families
• Language Families (bit map) of the Indian subcontinent
• States and Languages of Indian sub-continent (bit map)
• Language as an identity marker
     o German as the national language of the USA?
     o Language Wars in India and Linguistic Division of India
• Reading Assignment: An Introduction to Telugu (HTML)
• Introducing Telugu script - Vowels (HTML) and pronunciation
• Transliteration of Telugu in Roman script using Rice University's Inverse Transliteration (RIT)

2. Comparison of Telugu with other (Indian) languages
• Introducing Telugu script – Consonants (HTML)
• Scientific (Linguistic, phonetic) basis for the arrangement of the letters of the alphabet in Indian languages
• Commonality of sounds and diversity of shapes in Indian alphabets
• Comparison of Telugu script with Sanskrit, (HTML) Hindi and Tamil (HTML) scripts
• Comparison of Telugu with English
• Comparison of Indian languages with European languages

3. Introduction to Spoken Telugu and Pronunciation Guidelines
• Secondary forms of Vowels (HTML)
• Combining Consonants with Vowels – CV Combinations (HTML)
• Word formation
• Influence of Sanskrit on Telugu alphabet, vocabulary and grammar
     o Suffixes, prefixes and creation of new words
• Influence of English on Telugu vocabulary and grammar
• Pronunciation of Telugu and Sanskrit words and phrases
     o Common mistakes made by Westerners

4. Sentence Structure
• Sentence formation
• Pronouns: Various degrees of social honorifics in addressing in a social hierarchy
• Terms of endearment (Could not cover)
• Cultural concepts that are not easy to translate or explain (Could not cover)
o eMgili, maDi, mEnarikaM, gobbiLLu, sacredness of cows, arranged marriages, etc.

5. Building Vocabulary
• Numbers:(HTML) Ordinals, Cardinals, and their structure.
     o A Comparison with English and Hindi
• Colors (HTML) (could not cover)
• Family relations (HTML) (could not cover)
• Countries and nationalities (HTML) (Could not cover)
• Fruits and vegetables (Could not cover)

6. Telugu Literary Wealth
• Translations from Sanskrit
     o Religious themes
     o Secular themes
• Simple verses – Moral verse collections
     o Satakams
• Telugu Fiction – an essay (could not cover)

7. Telugu Music
• Two Schools of Music
     o Hindustani (North Indian)
     o Karnatic (South Indian)
• Classical
     o Annamaachaarya (Could not cover)
     o Tyagaraja (Could not cover)
• "Light" music

Class Preparation and Reference Material

While preparing for the class, I consulted Prof. Velcheru Narayana Rao and he gave me a copy of his "summer school notes." I believe that Prof. Narayana Rao's students are university-age adults and not necessarily of Indian origin. I also consulted Sri. Mandapati Satyam, who has been teaching this course to children (presumably of Indian in descent). Dr. Gavarasana Satyanarayana purchased a set of "copy books" on his visit to India and gave them to me. I also consulted the following web sites and extracted and used whatever material I thought useful.

Srinu and Anu Sirigina Web site, http://www.sirigina.com/
Hindi 101 Website at Syracuse University, http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/jishnu/101/
IIT –Madras site: http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/sanskrit/why_sans.html

Student Enthusiasm

To promote close interaction, the class size of Freshman Seminars was limited to 15 students. I was pleasantly surprised that 30 students were interested in taking the class and the 15 waitlisted students persuaded me to make an exception to the 15-student rule. Until the university granted the exception, these 15 students braved the odds and continued to attend the class! Throughout the Quarter, they were regular and meticulous. After the conclusion of the Quarter, many asked for a continuation in Fall Quarter. Some asked for more depth by expanding the class to two meetings a week.

Prof. Vemuri showing the difference between "pa" and "va"
guNiMtams. See also the RTS transliterations shown in Roman script.

Student Makeup

The class size eventually settled down at 24. There are three sophomores (second year students), one senior (final year student). Of the twenty four, six students are of Indian origin. One girl is hundred percent Telugu and learned Karantic music and Bharata Natyam as an youngster, but her knowledge of Telugu is marginal, at best. There are two other girls who are either Kannada speaking or of Kannada-Telugu parentage. Of the remaining 18 students, a majority are from Southeast Asia and China and a minority are white Americans (whose mother tongue is English, that is). In fact, in the entire student body, it appears, white Americans seem to be a minority and that is reflected in the composition of my class too.

Teaching Style

I told the students that class participation is essential for a good grade. Although it is basically a recitation, all the students were forced to participate. For one, they were required to come to the board and write some of the alphabet. They were required to say aloud as we go around the class with students taking turns, again and again. There was a small, yet regular, homework assignment every week. The assignments asked the students to write something using Telugu script. For example, in some assignments the students were given a list of Telugu words in RTS and they have to write the equivalents using Telugu script. In another assignment, they were given a sample "gunimtam" and they have to write another gunintam. In another, they were asked to copy the alphabetical characters using a page from a "copy book."

I also wanted to make sure that the students are not disheartened because they have not mastered the alphabet. To remedy this, throughout the course, whenever I write anything on the board in Telugu script, I also showed them the RTS transliteration in the Roman script, right next to it.

Rachel Weber (one of the best students in the class) learning
The difference between "sa" and "na" guNiMtaM.

Difficulties

Following Prof. Narayana Rao's system, I decided not to introduce the aspirated consonants (kha, gha, cha, etc.) until the students had a reasonable control on the rest of the characters. Nevertheless, students did experience difficulties in differentiating between certain pairs of similar-looking characters. Most of the difficulty came from the following pairs: va and pa; na and sa; ma and ya. The "gunimtam" associated with "ya" is also a trouble maker. I did not force the students to speak except saying aloud whatever they were writing.

From my own perspective, I found it repetitious and boring to spend so much of time – up front – teaching the alphabet. We have vowels, consonants, secondary forms for vowels, secondary forms for consonants, vowel-consonant combinations (gunimtamulu), consonant-consonant combinations (samyuktakshalamulu). If I did all of this systematically, the ten allotted lectures will be over without an opportunity to really learn the language.

Future Plans

I intend to re-offer this course in April 2004. This time, my plan is to offer the course for two credits and set the goal of developing a "tourist's ability" to conduct rudimentary conversation in specified situations. I intend to liberally use English words and phrases in these "conversations" as one mechanism to lighten the burden of building a vocabulary.

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