I. Dimensions: Each curriculum is multidimensional and it takes into consideration two major factors specific for New York University

1. Community: In such a big metropolitan center like New York City there is a large South Asian community, which allows the study of the Bengali, Hindi or Urdu language to merge into its natural environment, namely family, neighborhood, business, temples, etc.
2. Class demographics: The second factor is related to the class demographics in our Hindi language classes, their particular needs, goals as well as basic styles of learning.

II. Student Profiles: Our teaching materials and instructional strategies address the specific needs of our students. 

A. Background:

1. Foreign Language Learners (FLLs) – they have a good command of the linguistic code but are deficient in the socio-cultural component for the lack of extensive exposure and have not only practical but also academic goals.
2. Native Language Learners (NLLs) – in the last several years students with international status coming mostly from India have been joining our advanced classes. They come with native language skills at the Intermediate High/Advanced Low level, because of the bi- or tri-lingual environment and code-mixing or code-switching in English, they have limited experience sustaining formal speech on academic and abstract topics.
3. Heritage Language Learners (HLLs) – they are more than 95%, whose areas of improvement and strengths are reversed. Generally, they display some communicative and socio-cultural competence, but also need improvement in grammar accuracy,  literacy skills and understanding of the formal register and stylistic differences in both oral and written language. This is due to the limited range of circumstances, topics, and native speakers with which they have interacted in the language

There are four subgroups of Heritage Language Learners (HLLs) — according to the specifics of the language exposure and use they have had in the past:

• Associate language learners — whose family speaks Hindi or Urdu or Bengali
• Cognate associate language learners — whose family speaks another Indo-Aryan, i.e. cognate language such as Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi, Pashto, Baluchi, etc.
• Non-cognate associate language learners — who come from a Dravidian language speaking family, such as Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Burushaski, etc.
• Culture associate language learners — whose parents are from the South Asian diaspora (Fiji, Guyana, South Africa, etc.).

B. Proficiency Levels: Novice, Intermediate, Advanced — usually literacy skills are lower than the aural skills in the case of HHLs

C. Goals — Based on the surveys conducted at the beginning of the year:

1. Personal and practical goals — the vast majority of the students in our classes have. Usually, only a few students have professional and/or academic goals and prepare to work in India after graduation. They instead want to be able to converse fluently with their friends from the community or with relatives inIndia and in the US, to watch Hindi movies without subtitles, or to write letters in Hindi to their grandparents, who don’t know enough English.
2. Professional goals — a smaller group of students is interested in Bengali, Hindi, or Urdu because of academic and professional interests. Among them many plan to live and work in India, mostly for health organizations and educational NGOs. They need both survival and professional language skills.
3. Academic goals — these are mostly graduate students whose scope of study is political science, international relation, ethnomusicology, journalism, comparative literature and they usually need to develop high proficiency levels in literacy skills.

D. Learning Styles: Students assess their learning styles through the survey-inventory to become more aware of their preferences in order to support them to become independent and long-term learners.

III. Components of Bengali, Hindi, Urdu Curricula:

The curricula for all levels of Hindi and Urdu (Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced) are comprised of four main components: performance-based communicative-experiential component, cultural component, general language component, and specific language component.

1. Performance-based communicative-experiential component — the focal point of the curriculum emphasizing students’ performance, experience and communication. The jigsaw technique and group projects are used extensively in the classrooms — communicative and cooperative learning techniques which create opportunities for students’ active participation and increase positive educational outcomes.
2. Thematic component — identified as the cultural context for the development of communicative tasks in a project framework that lead toward a final performance-oriented goal. For example, at the intermediate level, such topics are geography, travel, festivals, traditions, religion, society, and gender relations.
3. Content component — features what knowledge and skills language learners learn to do in order to use Hindi effectively for communication. For example, at the intermediate level, within the thematic context outlined in the curriculum, the students learn to understand the main points of clear standard input, to produce simple connected text, to describe experiences and events, and to briefly express arguments. Learning how to learn is the guiding principle of the general language component. It zeros in on the development of second language learning procedures and tactics, which assist learners in improving their language skills. The instructor constantly makes them aware of a variety of specific strategies, namely cognitive strategies, such as identifying, retaining, storing, or retrieving of words, phrases, and other elements; meta-cognitive strategies, such as planning, organizing, and evaluating of the learning process; affective strategies for reduction of anxiety and for self-encouragement; social strategies, such as asking questions for clarification, compensating for language deficiency and cooperating with others.
4. Specific language component — covers the nuts and bolts of the curriculum, which details the language functions, grammar, structures, and vocabulary to be learned in the performance-based communicative-experiential context. Students are offered handouts, textbook chapters and a variety of help and support inside and outside the classroom for efficient learning with instructors and FLTAs.

IV. Objectives:

1. To provide opportunities for the learners to equally acquire and develop productive as well as receptive skills, as well as literacy and aural skills.
2. To guide the students in meaningful interactive activities to build relatively equal abilities in all the modalities, without neglecting or over-emphasizing one or another,
3. To prepare them to become independent learners who will continue learning Bengali, Hindi and Urdu productively after completion of formal instruction.
4. To engage learners in interactive in- and out-of-classroom activities that offer wide-ranging input. Variety of texts and native speakers provide extensive language exposure, which enhances their ability to recognize, understand, and ultimately master correct grammar, appropriate registers, particularly, the academic and professional varieties of Bengali, Hindi and Urdu, and socio-cultural references.
5. To create opportunities for the heritage learners to share their language and their cultural experiences. The Bengali, Hindi and Urdu programs allow students to work collaboratively with their families on personally relevant topics. In addition, instruction builds on what students already know and focuses on expanding students’ cultural knowledge about their South Asian heritage in relation to their identity without making them feel deficient in the process or in their words, ABCDs (American Born Confused Deshi).