I Hindi Grammar हिंदी व्याकरण Shobha Sharma Hindi Teacher IABBV Hindi School Inc Indian Community Languages Schools Parents & Teachers Conference 2017 Communities United Through Language

It so happens, that teaching grammar is a passion of mine. Telling a group of language teachers why it is important to teach grammar is like convincing a bird it’s important to fly or like teaching fish to swim … you all know why teaching the building blocks of a language are crucial to build confidence in language skills in the student.

Grammar is logical What I find is that children really respond to the logic, the reason why a word or sentence is structured or spelt the way it is. They are naturally curious. This curiosity can be harnessed to teach the rules of language.

Hindi is a phonetic language Hindi is a phonetic language, which is a teacher’s delight since every word sounds like it is spelt and spelt like it sounds. None of this confusing ‘so – do’ – as in English! I have created a cheat sheet for my class which captures the essential grammatical concepts in Hindi.

Hindi Language/ हिंदी भाषा

Games popular in my classroom are: Story builder I start a story with one line, each student extends the story taking it in different directions, sometimes humorous, sometimes bizarre … the object of the game is to use adjectives, verbs, tenses and of course build vocabulary.   Who Am I? The class decides on a celebrity (Bollywood movie star, world leader) and one student has to ask a series of questions to guess the identity of the person. Answers can only be given in yes or no not descriptive. Am I male? Am I an actor? Am I dead? Was I recently in the news?

Grammar Quiz and Weekly Grammar Guru All concepts covered are revised in a quiz, and kids being highly competitive, want to score the most points. Questions in the quiz include: Nouns are words that …, Name the three tenses of the verb, define pronoun, Use 3 sentences that have adjectives in them, what is the difference between the English and Hindi vowels? Why do nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs change in usage?   Awarded to the student with best recall of grammar each week – based on performance for the whole lesson

Role reversal Pick a student or get a volunteer who teaches the rest of the group the grammatical concept last covered (instead of teacher doing it) – eg. Explain gender, masculine, feminine to the class, given examples, ask the others questions about how the word changes when the gender changes, how it is spelt or pronounced differently, rules for gender. Good way to test their recall and build their confidence in not only understanding the concept but being able to explain its usage to someone else.

“I bow to the God within you” नमस्ते Namaste “I bow to the God within you”