सूचना युग में हिंदी शिक्षा एवं परीक्षण समस्याएँ एवं परिप्रेक्ष्य: Teaching and Testing of Hindi in Information Era Problems and Perspective (Conference Paper)

The National Testing Service-India is one of the major schemes of the MHRD, Govt. of India housed in Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore. At present, the NTS-India is working in Hindi, Tamil and Urdu languages to develop methods, materials and manpower in the area of educational testing and evaluation. Its activities will be extended to all other Indian languages in due course.

NTS-India has recently published Glossary of Evaluation Terms, An Introduction to Evaluation Terminology and General Frame of Reference for assessing Language, Literature and Personality components in Hindi. This collection of the papers presented in the National Conference jointly organized by NTS-I and Central Hindi Institute, Agra is a new feather in their cap. This is the 10" conference proceedings published by the CIIL and the first one brought out by NTS-I. I personally thank Prof. Mohan, Director, CHI, Agra for his support and cooperation in organizing this programme at Delhi.

Emergence of new technology has posed new challenges for present day teachers. The traditional methods of teaching are being replaced by the new or improved ones based on the information and communication technology to make the learners more attentive and involved. However, it has its own problems and may be evaluated from different perspectives before adopting it to be used on a mass scale. The papers of this collection broadly deal with these issues especially with reference to language education. I hope this collection of papers will be useful and beneficial to the academic community.

I congratulate Dr. M. Balakumar, Head, NTS and his team for this achievement and hope that they will continue to bring out materials in all the Indian languages.

I am also very happy that the volume is being published on the occasion of the foundation day of this Institute.

I also hope that this collection will, to some extent, fulfil the much felt need of basic reference materials in Indian languages, especially in Hindi.

This anthology contains the papers presented in the National Conference on ‘Teaching and Testing of Hindi in Information Era: Problems & Perspectives’ held on 15" and 16" March, 2013, jointly organized by the National Testing Service-India, CIIL, Mysore and Kendriya Hindi Sansthan, Agra at the Institute of Life Long Learning, Delhi University, Delhi.

The prime objective of the conference was to create more explicit awareness of the growing importance of the ICT in teaching and testing of languages with special reference to Hindi language and literature. The major aim of this conference was to explore the interface of all these perspectives and problems and suggest their solution that can facilitate educating the masses at affordable cost and enhance the quality of education, especially language education.

The conference proceedings have been divided into two parts — Teaching-Learning and Testing and Evaluation. Teaching Hindi for specific purposes, teaching material for Hindi as first, second and foreign languages, games / pictorial / reverse dictionaries as learning materials, teaching Hindi through distance mode, through Internet, development of LSRW skills, future of language in information era, use of multimedia in language education, virtual classroom and language teaching and use of the ICT in improving literacy were the broad areas of teaching learning part. Likewise, assessing mastery of language in L1 / SL / FL situation, assessing personality through language and literature, testing of language proficiency at different levels of education, use of ICT in construction, administration and evaluation of language tests, etc. were the main topics of testing and evaluation part.

The CIIL has a rich tradition of publishing conference and seminar proceedings, foundation day lectures and papers presented in different programmes and many other academic outcomes. So far, nine proceedings, three collections of foundation day lectures and a number of anthologies of papers have been published by the CIIL. This anthology is the latest in this series and perhaps the first one to be published in Hindi.

The papers of this collection have been contributed by senior scholars like Prof. H.S. Srivastava, Former HOD of Evaluation, NCERT, Delhi; Prof. K.P. Pandey, Former Vice Chancellor of MGKP, Varanasi; Prof. Thakur Das, formerly of the CHI; Prof. O.N. Koul and Prof. J.C. Sharma, both formerly of the CIIL. We have included valuable contributions from young academics also. So, this anthology claims to be the representation of the thoughts and ideas of three generations of academics involved in this process. Baring a few, most of the papers are written in Hindi.

We hope that this endeavor will contribute to the existing knowledge and understanding in this area of specialized nature and also improve the repository of knowledge text in Hindi.

**Contents and Sample Pages**