http://www.us.iearn.org/collaborate/programs/flap.php

The project linked New Jersey students with those in India through iEARN-India’s network of over 400 schools throughout India. The secure iEARN platform for student interaction was designed to handle all non-Western written scripts, including Hindi, Chinese and Arabic. As part of the preparation for this project, iEARN staff in both the US and India  worked with the Hindi curriculum developers to integrate authentic collaborative online work into it.

PUNE: "Mera naam Martin hai (My name is Martin)." This is how Martin Smith, the district world language supervisor of Edison in New Jersey, introduced himself on his visit to the city on Monday.

If learning foreign languages has become popular in India, Hindi, too, has found a rather large following back in the United States of America (USA). According to the US Federal government, Hindi is one of the critical-need' languages and is important to U S diplomacy, national security, and economic competitiveness.

Acting on this directive the Edison School board in New Jersey has introduced Hindi as an optional subject in high schools there. A team of 14 teachers from Edison were in the city to study how teachers instruct their pupil in the language. They visited a school in Nigdi and the International Study Centre, University of Pune and studied their Hindi curriculum meant for foreign students. The programme has been coordinated by International Education and Resource Network (iEARN).

Edison is the third such district in New Jersey to have introduced Hindi in high schools. Earlier, Huston and Dallas schools, located in Texas, had also made similar efforts and have been successful in making American students opt for the language.

For decades, high school students in the USA have been able to take opt for language classes in Latin, Spanish, French and even German. But given a shift in the global order and an increasingly diverse domestic population, high schools are now finding it necessary to offer Hindi and even Chinese as optional languages. "The Edison School Board received a special funding to introduce Hindi in our high schools because of the huge Asian population there," Smith informed.

Presently, US high schools have Asian students opting for Hindi, however, "the larger aim is to make the non-Asians learn the language. The effort is to popularise Hindi among Americans, which is a government directive," Smith informed.