17 July-26 August 2000
French Institute 
Pondicherry 

The third Tamil Summer School is scheduled in July-August 2000!

The Tamil Summer School is an intensive six-week programme conducted every year in July-August. It is organised by the Department of Social Sciences of the French Institute, in collaboration with Pondicherry University and other academic institutions in South India.
It is designed for students from foreign universities who have already started studying Tamil. The medium of instruction is English and Tamil.
The stress of the TSS is on the spoken variety of Tamil rather than on the classical and written forms as taught in European universities. 

Why spoken Tamil?
Tamil is an international language spoken in different countries (India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia etc.) by communities with a strong historical tradition of international migrations. 
However, apart from significant social and regional variations, Tamil language is characterised by a high level of diglossia between the written and the spoken forms. These differences affect the syntactic, lexical and phonetic features of Tamil. As a result, students of Tamil who are invariably trained in the written variety find themselves unable to communicate in Tamil Nadu and other Tamil-speaking areas. The TSS aims precisely at filling this important gap in Tamil studies by offering to students and scholars a summer programme focusing mainly on spoken Tamil.
 

COURSES OFFERED

The TSS formula is very simple: six students per class, six hours every day, six days a week, during six weeks of the TSS.

Description of the courses:

• Conversation: students are trained to talk in different day-to-day contexts with a variety of instructors
• Dictation and drill: this class is a follow-up of the grammar lessons and offers as well practical training in Tamil phonetics.
• Grammar: the core grammar offered here bridges the gap between written and spoken Tamil with emphasis on spoken usage.
• Movies: sequences of recent movies will be studied. The selection of movies is based on the characteristics of dialogues (difficulties, regional variants etc.)
• Newspapers: materials from newspapers (articles, headlines, cartoons) are provided to improve the students' reading skill.
• Songs: students will be introduced to different styles of songs (nursery rhymes, film songs, folk songs).
• Teaching materials include more than 300 pages of manuals and handouts in Tamil and English that have been prepared exclusively for the Tamil Summer School: grammar handout, children songs, folk songs, conversation, newspapers clips, cinema songs, dictation, etc. The teaching materials for 1999 have already been revised and approved by an expert committee of Tamil Scholars who participated in the workshop on Tamil Teaching Materials (Pondicherry University, Dec. 98).
• In addition, one afternoon is devoted to individual projects based on fieldwork. Students will be encouraged to use Tamil outside the classroom situation to collect information on specific aspects of Tamil culture and society (food recipes, kinship terms, market functioning, oral history, etc.).

TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

 Participants
Participants are students and scholars with at least one year of formal training in written Tamil, with a good knowledge of basic grammar. 
   PLEASE NOTE that the school is not designed for complete beginners.

Students will be divided into two or three classes according to their proficiency in Tamil (intermediate, advanced 1, advanced 2) and the number of students registered. Classes are held separately for each level (between 4 and 8 students per class).
The school has so far enrolled students from Inalco (Paris), Heidelberg and Hamburg Universities in Germany, Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England, Tokyo University in Japan , the School of Oriental and African Studies (London), etc. 
Students are encouraged to apply for fellowship from their own university. Two to four fellowships are available for French students from the French Government
(contact: boursiers-francais@diplomatie.fr).
 

Teaching Staff
Teachers in charge of the core classes are from Pondicherry University (Dept. of Tamil Studies) and the Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture.
Every week, invited scholars will join us from other institutions such as the Central Institute of Indian Languages (Mysore), International Institute for Tamil Studies (Chennai), Annamalai University (Chidambaram), and Madurai Kamaraj University, etc. All instructors are native speakers.
 

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Dr. C. Z. Guilmoto (French Institute/IRD), Prof. S. Arokianathan (Pondicherry University), Dr. I. G. Zupanov (CNRS, Paris).

Secretary of the TSS: Ms. P. Tiaré, French Institute.
 

YOUR STAY IN PONDICHERRY

Pondicherry is a small Tamil city, 140 km away from Chennai international airport. The French Institute and the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient offer very good library facilities (most notably in social sciences and indology).
Pondicherry has a very good tourist infrastructure with more than fifty hotels and lodges. Cost of living is extremely moderate by European standards. Every year, the TSS also tries to identify Tamil-speaking families offering paying-guest accommodation in the town.

ENROLMENT AND FEES

Enrolment starts in January every year. Registration fees for 2000 will be the equivalent of Rs 12000 (around EUR 270). 
Registration to the course is effective upon the receipt of a deposit (cheque in major currencies such as US $, FF, DM, or £ payable to the French Institute of Pondicherry). This deposit will not be encashed; payment will be made in roupees in Pondicherry.