Teaching materials for Tamil are of varying quality, and reflect the
pedagogical approaches, priorities and methodologies of previous eras.
No comprehensive regularly-published materials for instruction of modern spoken
Tamil (i.e. with audio materials) have appeared since 1979 (Rajaram 1979), and much of the material that
is still available is in hand-written or pre-computer-generated form.
Once computer-generated Tamil fonts became available in the mid-1980's,
different centers diverged on hardware (and therefore on font software)
and made irrevocable commitments either for MacIntosh on the one hand,
while others (e.g. U. of Washington) found themselves in the MS-Dos
environment, with the resultant incompatibility of fonts, output devices,
source files, etc.
Currently-available computer-generated materials can thus be easily
shared in print form, but not in electronic form. People responsible for
teaching Tamil at the various institutions have long discussed the
necessity of cooperating in the production of new
materials, but no
cooperation has ever taken place, mostly because of the lack of funding,
because of the endemically minuscule enrollments in Tamil courses, and
because of the general lack of support for LCTL's in the general scheme
of things. The question often asked when requests for support went to
federal funding sources was ``What's wrong with the things we've
already funded?"
The advent of the Internet and especially of graphical interfaces has
made the possibility of collaboration in this area finally possible, and
what this proposal intends to do is to gather good materials from
wherever they exist (Berkeley, Chicago, Cornell, Washington, Wisconsin,
or abroad) and convert them for use over the WWW. That is, it does not
seek explicitly to develop new materials, only make extant materials more
widely available. The P.I. of this project has consulted with those
responsible for teaching Tamil at the two other Consortium sites, and has
been assured by Professors Gair (at Cornell) and Cutler (at Chicago) that
this idea is not only to be welcomed but one that they will cooperate
with in the sharing of whatever resources exist. Given the fact that the remaining sites,
Berkeley and Wisconsin, are staffed by people who shared the original
suggestion of pooling our materials, there should be no problem in
getting materials into one place.