Course Description
Foundations in spoken and written Hausa language. Special attention will be paid to oral and aural skills and basic grammar. Additional computer and online work required. The course will also be an introduction to Hausa culture.
Athena Title
Elementary Hausa I
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This course covers basic elementary Hausa language and culture and serves as level one of the required language proficiency. The major goals are: 1. To enable students to develop communicative skills in Hausa through listening, speaking, reading, and writing. 2. To provide insights into the key aspects of the language, culture, traditions, and customs of the speakers of Hausa and to use acquired knowledge to critically evaluate material provided in films and texts with a rich cultural content. At the end of the level, students are expected to have a basic understanding of key cultural issues associated with the language and to critically evaluate cultural enhancing material specifically from texts and films. The students are expected to be able to construct simple sentences that are grammatically correct and pragmatically acceptable by native speakers, write a 300-word essay using simple Hausa, sustain ten minutes of conversation that includes self introduction, introducing others, describing objects, reporting incidents or events, including dates and times.
Topical Outline
1. Introductory information about the history, culture, and geographical location of the Hausa peoples across the Sahelian region of Africa. 2. Basic sound patterns and their cultural base. 3. Basic conversational structures: greetings, introducing oneself, how to start a conversation, cultural and social codes in conversations. 4. Basic parts of speech: noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, conjunction. 5. Basic sentence structure (focusing on pragmatics, grammatical relations of sentence units that build up simple and complex sentences and their cultural base interpretations). 6. The cultural implications of voice: active and passive, causative, reflexives (these will be introduced with reference to the different verb forms that affect the overall meaning of a statement/utterance).