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Instructor

Rachel Lileet-Foley

I've been fascinated with language since high school, when I first read Charlton Laird's The Miracle of Language. At the University of Minnesota I jumped at the chance to join one of the first Hindi classes offered in this country under the newly enacted National Defense Foreign Language Act, which was part of America's response to the launching of Sputnik in 1958. My junior year in college ended with an opportunity to spend the summer researching and producing language-teaching materials for the brand-new Peace Corps. I worked my entire senior year producing materials for Urdu and Bengali while I continued my study of Hindi. On graduation I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and spent a year in Patna, teaching English as a Foreign Language and conducting sociological research on the Anglo-Indian community.

A year later I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and soon to be the mother of my oldest son. The next year the three of us, my then-husband Rodney, baby son Hugh and I, were in Kerala, re-writing materials we had developed for teaching Malayalam to Peace Corps trainees. The very weekend we finished that text in 1967, when my second son was four months old, the Peace Corps was kicked out of Kerala. The Peace Corps never used our text and I've always thought of it as a cosmic joke.

We left Madison and went to the University of Missouri-Columbia, where my husband and I both taught Hindi. I finished my MA in India Studies and would have gone on with my first love, Hindi, except that Nixon was in the White House. The National Defense Foreign Language Program was being dismantled. So I went on to study speech pathology at the University of Missouri.

Some years later I felt a strong need to return to India, and I began teaching Hindi again to earn some extra money. I returned to India the summers of 1985 and '86, leading tour groups. I continued teaching Hindi in the evenings and at Portland State University the summers of 1987, '88 and '89. I revisited India in 1997 and again in 1998. This time I taught Hindi for a University of North Carolina semester-in-India program that was housed at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi.

My last trip to India was summer, 2004. I took an advanced class in Hindi at Hindi Himalaya House near Uttarkashi . I was with a small group of my students and their young children. We had a marvelous time and I learned a lot more Hindi. But the highlight of the trip was climbing to Tapovan above the source of the Ganges and sleeping overnight in a cave at 14,620 feet.

My qualifications for teaching Hindi include the following:

I have several years of college-level teaching experience in Hindi (Portland State University, University of Missouri, University of North Carolina at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi), as well as more than 20 years of private instruction.

I taught language-disordered children for 18 years, during which time I had the privilege of watching and studying child language acquisition in slow motion.

My academic degrees and training include:
MA India Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 1974 (with specialization in linguistics)
MA Speech Language Pathology, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1976
CCC-SLP (Certificate in Clinical Competence-Speech Language Pathology), 1978