Next: Research Associate
Up: Personnel
Previous: Personnel
The P.I. for this project is Harold
F. Schiffman, Henry R. Luce Professor of Language Learning, South Asian
Regional Studies, University of Pennsylvania. I have taught Tamil at
the U. of Washington (for 28 years) and am now Academic Director of the
Penn Language Center, at Penn. Because of the extreme
diglossic situation in Tamil, and the difficulty of teaching essentially
two different forms of the language simultaneously, my special interest
as a language teacher has always been the necessity of focussing on the
teaching of Spoken Tamil, and have devoted some part of my career
to the production of materials for teaching Spoken Tamil (Schiffman 1971,
1974) and especially reference materials (Schiffman 1979) to support
Spoken Tamil rather than literary Tamil. Others in this country, indeed
most teachers of Tamil anywhere, have concentrated on teaching literary
Tamil, but my own experience has been that if Spoken Tamil is not taught
to students before they go to India, they will almost never learn it when
they get there, because the cultural pressure is always in favor of LT
and never in favor of ST.
See Appendix B for Curriculum Vitae. See also my homepage at
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/ haroldfs.
Harold Schiffman
Mon Apr 1 09:56:50 EST 1996