AIIS Advanced Language Programs

Guidelines for Living in an Indian Environment

(AIIS Students: Based on your own experiences, you are invited to contribute to these guidelines after your program is over. All contributors will be added to

the list of authors for this document)

I. Cultural Orientation

Welcome Aboard for a World of Experience!

Some of you are going to India for the first time and others are experienced travelers in India. For those of you whose experience in India consists primarily of travel, and for those of you how have only spent a limited time in residence in India, please note that settling down with a family and cultivating relationships within a small city community for a year is a very different experience. Whereas when you travel from place to place, your individual actions in each place have very little repercussions over a long period but when you settle down in one place every action becomes remembered by the community - it becomes a piece of your identity as it is constructed within the community.

For those of you who are visiting India for the first time, you will find many cultural differences, ranging from the way that people conduct simple daily activities, such as shopping or bathing, to the entire way in which people interact with one another. Learning to live within a foreign community takes patience and understanding, as well as a lot of compromise.

Remember that for every interaction or behavior that seems strange to you, your reaction and counter-behavior may seem equally, if not more, unusual or incomprehensible to someone else.

The key to having a successful experience on a program like AIIS is compromise and adaptation. You will be living in someone else's community, and you will be on their home ground. As a result, it is your responsibility to compromise and adapt as much as needed in order to live harmoniously for the year. If you take the initiative and keep communication as open as possible, you may find that your friends and host family will be more willing to compromise to meet you halfway in any given situation.

Remember, your actions reflect not only on yourself, but on the entire program, as well!!! You are beginning long-standing and firmly established programs, some of which have recently relocated to a new place such as the Hindi program in Jaipur. For years, the program was held in Varanasi and then in Udaipur, where it developed a strong network of host families and friends within the broader community. Because of the recent move, the network is in the process of construction. The program directors have done a good job at beginning this process, but you all will be playing an important role in expanding and solidifying the networks that they have begun. Your actions and activities can help shape the program's future for better or for worse. Do keep this in mind over the course of the next year - keep a mental list of successful moments, as well as those aspects of the program that are the cause of potential problems, communicate with the program directors and your larger community, and help shape the program's future in a constructive way!

Suggestions for successful strategies

Here are some successful strategies for compromise and adaptation based on personal experiences from both the AIIS summer language program, University of Wisconsin College Year in India Program, and Penn-in-India study abroad program.

1. Understanding the Belief and Basic Assumptions of the Host Community

Living in a foreign community is a clear situation where two sets of behavioral norms arising from the underlying sets of beliefs, assumptions and visions of life can collide. Such intercultural collisions can give a call for expressing annoyance, anger or even conflict. On the conscious level, dealing with such situations calmly and cognitively can be an opportunity to learn about the other culture. Needless to say it is important to gradually understand the underlying beliefs and assumptions of the other community to understand their overt behavior. Warmth, sincerity, respect, readings and keen observations are the key to unlock the many doors of such knowledge about the host culture.

2. Owning Our Collective Responsibility

Fostering a focused, productive and dynamic learning environment in our advanced language programs is the joint responsibility of students, teachers and all others connected with the program. Although every effort is made to provide our students with all that we can, the situation may still be imperfect due to many local and financial constraints. To maximize your stay in the host country, it is often necessary to overlook some of the small matters in the interest of your larger goals. Please try to discuss such problems when they arise with another member of your class or in a group and try to find a friendly solution. If at any stage you need the assistance of your instructors or the program director please do not hesitate to talk to them. For major difficulties with your work, your family, or with another student, work with the program and talk with the program director before trying to tackle it on your own!!! Mediation can eliminate any problems that might arise from miscommunication, or it might ease the process of finding a solution acceptable to all.

3. Dealing with Frustrations & Anger

Dealing with frustrations and anger while living in another society demand additional social skills. Frustrations may arise from your own work that can be overwhelming at times or from someone’s behavior that did not meet your expectations. Living in another society can be stressful, but understanding a different set of rules, trying to live by them, and keeping open communication channels with your program fellows and local friends will certainly go a long way in minimizing such situations.

4. Conflict Resolution

If there is a conflict between you and another person, try to think of the best ways to resolve it without any serious side effects to an individual or the program. Try to go beyond the surface behavior of the other person and try to realize his or her intentions. There is a good possibility that you may find the situation at fault and not the person. Try to communicate with someone with whom you have established a rapport and discuss the matter with him/her to get another point of view.

While among the people in your program: Living with the same small group of people for a year can be stressful. There may be people with whom you get along better than others. Nonetheless, try to keep the best relations possible with all of the people in the program, and confront conflicts when they arise, perhaps with the mediation of a friend or program director.

5. Living with a Host Family

When living with a family, you will be expected to live by their rules. For example, if you are female, they may deem it inappropriate for you to go out late at night with a male companion. They may ask you to respect certain rules of the family (i.e. to not enter the kitchen if they are a traditional Brahman family, or to not bring alcohol into their house).

They may have children of their own, and they may want to protect them from what they might deem as inappropriate or socially unacceptable practices. You may have to compromise a bit to maintain good relations, and perhaps they will compromise a bit to make you feel more comfortable. Whatever the case, if you don't want to live by their rules, you don't have to live in their house, but if you do want to live with that family, you'll have to respect their traditions and rules. Do keep in mind that certain rules may remain constant from family to family, and you may just have to accept them as part of the cultural experience of living in India for the year.

If you're female, you might want to keep some distance between yourself and male family members. They may be your host relatives, but they are not your blood relatives.

If there are items that you don't want people to see, keep them in a locked trunk or bag. Our concept of privacy here in the U.S. is not the same concept of privacy that you will encounter in India. If you tend to be very secretive about your belongings, people will be curious; if you are more open, they will be less so.

In the case of a conflict (i.e. disagreement about curfew, boundaries of privacy, or even harassment) with your host family, try to work through the program before tackling the issue on your own. If it is possible to work the problem out, the program directors may be more qualified to mediate than anyone else. If the problem is impossible to work out, the program directors will be able to help you move out of your house and give you support in the most tactful way possible.

6. Developing Good Relationships within your Neighborhood

Get to know people in your neighborhood and areas around your neighborhood. (although women should be wary of talking too much to men to whom they have not been introduced). These people will be a good support for you. If you are going to leave for a trip, etc., ask a friend or family member to watch your house. Protect your privacy - don't let strangers know where you live, and ask your neighbors not to divulge personal information about you.

7. Male/ Female Interactions

Know the appropriate boundaries. It is not appropriate for a man to touch a woman in public, or to talk to a woman he doesn't know (i.e. ask for friendship, a walk, a movie, etc.) and vice versa. Be wary of inappropriate advances - the rules of courtesy do not apply here. One student on the Wisconsin program several years ago created a huge scandal in his neighborhood when he invited a local girl to go to see a festival with him. It was a friendly invitation with no illicit intent, yet the community interpreted it as the equivalent of an inappropriate advance. Keep this in mind when interacting with the local community.

Try not to let members of the opposite sex enter your room unsupervised. Keep the door open, or meet them in a public part of the house. Otherwise what might simply be a friendly encounter might be construed as promiscuity, which is not the type of identity you wish to accrue in India. Such behavior can only increase the harassment that women students, in particular, might encounter.

When traveling alone, women should feel free to try to book a women's carriage, or ask people to shift seats so that they can sit with other women.

Women should avoid smoking in public (and drinking in place where people from their neighborhood can observe them). Such activities are often associated with promiscuity and may incite harassment.

Romantic relationships with members of the local community should be avoided at all costs!!! Our concept of dating is not synonymous with the Indian concept of dating (especially in smaller cities like Jaipur or Madurai), and can have drastic consequences. You may end up ruining someone's reputation within his or her community, and instances of dating with members of the community have had some very serious effects in the past (reportedly, one case led to a dramatic suicide when the relationship broke up).

Women - if you are ever harassed or groped in public while in the company of other women, make your complaint as vociferous and loud as possible. Attracting the attention of people in the crowd can lead to public embarrassment for the perpetrator, which may make him think twice before he harasses someone again. In my experience, people in the crowd have been very supportive, since the majority of people on the streets do not support such behavior.

8. Clothing

Clothing can sometimes pose a dilemma for the American in India, especially for the American woman. Do you wear pakka Indian clothing? Or do you shrug off any attempts at assimilation and cling to your jeans and T-shirt? Either option is fine, as long as they fall within a certain range of accepted cultural values. For example, some of you might feel more comfortable in Western clothes, but women should make sure that their clothes are relatively loose and cover all necessary body areas. Similarly, men should follow accepted conventions of decency. Others may find that they really enjoy wearing Indian clothes. With these, you might have an easier time, once again, if you follow accepted conventions. For example, if male students chose to wear a lungi, they should not be surprised if they get odd looks or if someone mistakes them for a dhobi. If going to a nice restaurant or special dinner at somebody's house, follow the same rules of thumb you would use here in the U.S. - dress nicely and appropriately for the occasion. When visiting a sacred site (temple, mosque or church), you may want to be especially respectful in what you choose to wear. Eventually you'll find the compromise that suits you best, but whatever that may be, remember the following: never wear short pants!!! Also, keep in mind that the type of clothing that one can wear in one place may not be the same as in another (i.e. clothes that may be appropriate in New Delhi and Calcutta may certainly not be in Jaipur or Madurai or in a village). A good rule of thumb is to observe what the people around you are wearing and follow their guidelines.

9. Living in a Tourist City/ Bargaining

Many cities, such as Jaipur, attract more tourists than cities like Madurai or Calcutta. In such cities, walking through tourist-frequented areas can be a stressful experience. Although your experience with salesmen and tourist-trap hustlers can leave a bad impression, not everyone is simply after money and/or favors. You may find that people who initially approach you for favors or money might end up becoming much more genuinely friendly once they realize that you are a student and not just a tourist, and once you become a more familiar face to them. Everyone has different ways of handling the stress of being treated like a tourist on the street, but common to all of them is to be patient, ignore the more pushy hustlers, and recognize that they process of bargaining with shop-keepers is very much a playful game.

Deshi or videshi, bargaining is very much a part of life - no one can make you buy something you don't want to buy, and a shopkeeper will never sell anything for a loss. If you treat the process as a playful game, you'll have a better experience than if you take it as a devious attempt by the shopkeeper to cheat you out of all your worldly goods. If you don't feel like being harassed, avoid the more touristy areas of the city, and shop in the local markets.

Also do note that tourists come in a variety of shapes and forms. Some are students or academics, some are people involved in development or NGO practices, others still are ordinary people on an exotic vacation, while some are hippie remnants. Some of the most interesting people that past students have met have been on the tourist circuit in India, both in a positive and negative sense. You can be a tremendous resource for some tourists (since you will know the city inside out), just as they can be for you. Some of the best experiences have come out from such meetings. At the same time, keep in mind that people in your community will associate you with the type of people with whom you choose to associate yourself.

10. Dealing with Academic Stress

The AIIS language program can be very stressful. Every week you're required to meet a fairly demanding schedule that may well be more rigorously structured that your graduate school life in the U.S. The best thing to do is to not allow yourself to become frustrated. One strategy for dealing with the assignments that has worked for many is to start early and do them gradually. For example, repeatedly leaving your weekly journal for the last night can lead to headaches, but doing it slowly, a few pages at a time, over the course of the week will allow you to take breaks when you no longer have the stamina to keep writing. Taking time off your written assignments, and practicing speaking with your host family or friends, may also provide a welcome, yet productive break. If, at any point, you feel overwhelmed, talk with one of the program teachers or directors.

Also, you might find it helpful to hold monthly movie nights or group dinner parties, discussions, music performances, or some other form of activity either at the program house or at somebody's place (with necessary permission, of course). After all, there's nothing better for a boost to morale than a bit of informal kickback time.

Or, if you need some time to yourself or are feeling a bit homesick, it may help to find a comfortable place to sit, and write a letter. It is really important to keep vibrant communications open with the people who you miss (who are at home or traveling elsewhere in the world) while you are away for a long period of time. This type of correspondence can really help you feel more grounded in a way that will have positive repercussions on your ability to handle academic or personal stresses in India.

11. Courtesy, Cleanliness, and Customs of Courteous Behavior

Some common rules of courtesy apply in any situation, but you might want to keep the following in mind for your stay in India. You will find that many actions associated with courteous behavior and cleanliness in the U.S. do not have the same meaning in India, and vice versa. Here is a short list of do's and don'ts for you to add to over the course of the year:

· Please do your best to be respectful to the people associated with the program in culturally appropriate ways. The future of the program and its continued good relationship with its surrounding community depend on this.

· When at someone's house, sit cross-legged or with your feet folded underneath you - you want to make sure that you don't point your feet at anyone, since this will be construed as an insult.

· Try not to hand anything (i.e. money, a gift, etc.) to anyone with your left hand - use your right hand whenever possible.

· Always eat with your right hand (never with your left). It is perfectly acceptable, however, to use your left hand to pick up your glass, etc., once your right hand is soiled with food.

· Don't share food off of your plate while eating a meal. Once you've started your meal, they food will be considered jhuuThaa (unclean/used/not fit for consumption by others).

· Water washes away all. It is the universal purifier. For example, those of you who are encountering the "Indian toilet" for the first time may find it difficult to accept. However, it is considered by many to be much cleaner than our paper-heavy system, since paper does nothing more than move the impurity from one place to another, while water has the ability to purify all. Some people find it immensely funny (and simply disgusting) that people in the West use toilet paper. Everything is a frame of mind.

· The use of courtesy formulas such as thank you, please or the use of giving and accepting compliments is very different in India. The verbalization of such formulaic expressions is very limited. Although verbalization of gratitude is appreciated but it is not always expected.

· Indian society enjoys its hierarchical structure in the society. People in the younger age group are expected to initiate the greetings first.

· When addressing or talking about others who are in the older age group or are socially senior (e.g., older brother’s wife, teacher) it is appropriate not to address them or talk about them by their first name. Some socially appropriate honorific prefix or suffix or the use of a kinship term is often needed.

· Do not blow your nose into a napkin or a handkerchief in the company of others. The best way to do it to go aside and do it. On the other hand, you will find belching not so discourteous in the Indian society.

12. Student-Teacher Relationship

Student-teacher relationship in India and the United States is different in some ways. You do not address your teacher by first name, no matter how younger that person might be than you. Some honorific linguistic device (e.g., jii after the first name or the use of formal second person pronoun aap) is expected. Students in India do not challenge their teachers’ authority and knowledge. One listens to one’s teachers with respect and reverence. There is a belief that one needs respect and reverence for one’s teacher to receive knowledge. The AIIS instructors also receive orientation about their students’ needs and are therefore better equipped to meet their students halfway. They are friendly and, unlike many other Indian teachers, encourage their students to ask questions and they engage them in interactive dialogues. Your cooperation with them in the maintenance of good learning environment is important. Also, if there is a problem we encourage you not to hesitate to let the appropriate authority know about it.

13. Avoid Discussing Sensitive Topics with Local People

Politics and religious conflict are two sensitive topics and people can get at times emotional about their viewpoints. In such cases, it is best to listen to others and not to get involved in any argument.

II. Academic Orientation

Below please find a brief introduction to the sociolinguistic situation in India followed by an important section on your responsibility to take charge of your own learning. Language learning is a journey of lifetime and it is important to take charge of one’s own learning. Serious learners with long-term goals need to be aware of their learning environment, how to best use their academic and social resources and how to think about language learning as a process. Hopefully, you will find some good tips here that will help you in the language acquisition process.

1. Sociolinguistic Situation in India

· The South Asian subcontinent is highly multilingual. English is the dominating link language between different educated speech communities. Hindi is also making its headway in non-Hindi speaking states. Most people command two or more languages. It is not uncommon to see a person using one language at home, a second on the street, a third in school, a fourth in a holy place, and a fifth at work. Furthermore, people find it difficult to keep them separate in their speech. For various social and psychological reasons, they mix them freely at the lexical and sentential levels. They also switch from one language to the other depending on the topic they are talking about or who they are talking to. This is commonly known as code switching.

• South Asian languages are diglossic. There is a wide gap between informal and formal varieties of every language. The two varieties of most South Asian languages differ in their choice of vocabulary. For some South Asian languages such as Tamil, there are also differences in the use of morphology and syntax. Even for native speakers, acquisition of the formal vocabulary and formal grammatical features of their language is not automatic. One acquires them through formal education. Persons who have not acquired formal education may not comprehend the language of a newspaper editorial, TV news or a high-flown speech, as all of these are highly formal in their structure.

• The literary styles of South Asian languages with long literary traditions have interacted with other literary traditions and have developed various concepts and expressions in order to meet literary exigencies. Tamil has assimilated Sanskrit traditions and Hindi has assimilated Sanskrit and Urdu conventions. As a result, many new concepts and words to express them have been incorporated in the corpus of the language. For example, there are many different words for water, sky, flower, cloud, food, earth, body, soul, deity, God, teacher, mother, father, son, daughter, and hundreds of such words. One will find that such a variety of words have their own niche and they appear in their own contexts with some overlapping. This intuition builds up from an in-depth interaction with the language and its various genres.

2. Empowerment of the Learner: Taking charge of your own learning

Of late, the focus has been shifting gradually from teaching and passive listening to active involvement of learners, the learning environment and the learning process. The results are extremely gratifying. With this focus shift, it is necessary that the learners get involved in the planning and implementation of the learning process. Here are some suggestions in this regard:

· Be involved in all stages of your language learning: planning, implementing, monitoring, problem solving and evaluating. Discover what you can already do in the language, and note down what you need to focus on.

· Define your own needs and see their fulfillment through initial stages of planning to the final stages of communicative performance. Keep a systematic record of your needs, your achievements and your failures. Learning logs help learners to reflect on their learning needs and their progress.

· Consult and negotiate with your teachers in planning the syllabus, selection of materials and employment of classroom strategies;

· Enhance your awareness about the sociolinguistic aspects of the target language;

• Heighten your analytical view of language use;

• Identify and invent language learning opportunities outside the classroom where you will grapple with the ‘real’ language in all its regional and socioeconomic variations;

• Keep track of your language learning curve: your strengths as well as patterned and unpatterned errors;

• Think of ways and means to upgrade your structural accuracy and the idiomatic ways of language use.

• Develop confidence for interacting with a variety of native speakers in unpredictable (informal & formal) situations.

Individual Learning Log

You will receive your individual learning log from your AIIS language program in India.

Use the log for noting:

• your long term goals for speaking, listening, reading, vocabulary, grammar, strategies, and cultural background knowledge
• your successful interactions today: what you were able to communicate and understand;
• your observations about your interlocutor’s strategies, content and language
• what you did not succeed in doing but wanted to do
• your short term goals for the next day/next week

Setting Short Term Goals and Long Term Goals

In your program, you will have some general goals for all the students but you will also have the opportunity to set your own goals based on your specific needs. Your long-term goals should be divided into a series of short-term goals.

Each short-term goal should be further subdivided into day-by-day goals. Speaking of day-by-day goals:

· Every morning, set your communicative goals

· During the day, try to accomplish your goals to the best of your ability

· Keep a note of the details of daily communicative activities, your successes and difficulties

· Complete your log the same evening

· Next day, seek your instructor’s help for the points you had difficulty with

· Ensure you understand the new point conceptually and then you had some practice/drilling using it

5. Benefits

A continuous awareness of one’s own learning path

· helps learners to assess their language learning needs, the appropriateness of the tools (materials, strategies), the learning processes and the progress (successes and failures) in accomplishing their language learning goals;

· commits learners to greater emotional and psychological involvement in the language learning endeavor;

· helps learners to correct or adjust some of the measures under way when necessary.

6. Role of the Teacher

In this new scenario, a teacher creates the necessary learning conditions for his students, oversees their activities and steps in to advise them when necessary. The teacher helps when his student is stuck, corrects him when he is wrong. He prepares them for intramural and extra-mural activities to maximize their learning. The teacher is a resource person. He is the storehouse of knowledge and experience that students draw on in time of need. He is a reservoir of the free-flowing idiomatic target language which students get exposed to in appropriate bits of comprehensible input. He supplements what is available in print, encourages students to think critically, and devises activities in which students can participate meaningfully. He likes his students to capture the center stage in the classroom and quietly and strategically relegates himself to the background. Teachers provide continuous feedback on the performance of their students and help them to be aware of their learning trajectory.

7. Tips for Language Learners

• Be realistic in your learning goals because the linguistic and cultural distance between South Asian languages and English is much greater than between, say, French and English.

• Time spent on communicative tasks and the intensity with which you perform it is crucial for what you get out of it.

• In social interactions, there is a lot that is simply assumed. This is the background knowledge about the target culture that native share. The new learners need to acquire this. This is helpful in understanding what others say and provides content explicit or assumed content in communicating with others. You can gain such information by reading in your native language too.

• Pay special attention to the development of informal and formal styles of your target language. Because of the diglossic nature of the target language, you may be able to get yourself across in speech yet may not be able to comprehend formal speech or writing by others.

• Be an independent learner because 2-4 semesters of classroom instruction is not sufficient to gain a working proficiency in a South Asian language, especially if you are a beginner. Language learning is a life long endeavor, so learn strategies to turn the real world into a classroom. You must seek opportunities for language use and turn every interlocutor into your teacher by asking him or her the right questions. A judicial use of reference tools such as grammars and dictionaries is helpful in language development.

• Work with your teachers to achieve your learning goals. Your active participation and creative ideas about learning are very important because pedagogic materials in South Asian languages are not the state of the art. Both teachers and learners have to work together to go beyond grammar-translation and audio-visual approach of the sixties. Language is communication and interaction, so seek and create communicative activities for language use.

• Evaluate your proficiency level by carefully reading the proficiency guidelines for your target language (if not available, read for Hindi or English to get a sense of general levels and tasks). Make a note of tasks you can perform and how well you can perform those tasks. See if you can ask and answer questions, narrate and describe, give explanations, state and support an opinion. Judge your language not only for its pronunciation and grammatical accuracy, but also for its appropriateness. Pay attention to what you say to whom, when, and where.

• Grab opportunities for language practice. The domains for South Asian languages are already curtailed due to the multilingualism and the presence of English in South Asia. One can survive with English alone in South Asia, but remember you have to set your goals beyond survival. If you wish to gain working or professional level proficiency, you must not miss any opportunity that helps you advance your language skills.

• Do not be afraid of making mistakes. Mistakes are part of your language developmental process. However, you must pay attention to your mistakes, especially the recurring ones. Work on your errors before they fossilize. Some errors are more costly in terms of meaning than others. The ultimate goal should be to eradicate all major and minor errors irrespective of their functional load.

• Know the difference between productive (speaking and writing) and receptive (listening and reading) skills. Productive skills are more demanding because you, the learner, has to know the correct pronunciation or spellings, endings, word meanings, structures, and the rules of usage. In receptive skills, however, you can afford to overlook many grammatical and semantic details (e.g., gender or number marking), as they are not important for unlocking the meaning of an oral or a written text. Remember, receptive skills function as a rich source of linguistic and cultural input and in turn help in enriching the output.

• Identify your learning style and use appropriate strategies for advancing your language skills. There is a cognitive learning style (analytic approach) versus affective and behavioral style (practice approach). For locking new words into the memory one may use visualization, sound, use of motor activities, or any combination of these. It is true that for the most part learning style is inherent, but some of it can be changed with awareness. Some of your inherent strategies may be counter-productive, so learn to evaluate your existing strategies and experiment with new ones.

• There are stages of language development. Most of the time learners proceed from concept control to partial control and then to consistent control of linguistic rules. Concept control means you understand the rule, but are not able to use it when needed. Partial control means you can use it some of the time correctly, but not all the time correctly. Consistent control means you can use it correctly almost all the time. The awareness of your stages of learning will help you to a right perspective of your learning curve.

• Take all learning to a level of ‘automaticity’.

• Language learning sometimes works as a series of "plateaus", rather than being a strictly linear process - i.e. students might find that they don't seem to be getting any better for a week or so, and then suddenly, almost without warning, they'll find that they're worlds ahead of where they were just the day before.

Learning and using the language of your host society is one of the highest forms of respect and admiration you can show. It is a powerful act that will bring you respect and applause from your local acquaintances and friends.