Sanjukta Banerjee

sanjukta@sas.upenn.edu

Title: Lecturer

Courses:

Course Description/Objectives:

Spring
Advanced Bengali: Bengali Popular Culture

The main aim of the course is to promote an understanding of the language and to support and stimulate an interest in research on various aspects of Bengali literature, culture,  society and social/religious movements. This course aims to use as its content, different aspects of popular Bengali culture as they are represented in media(film, television, magazines, newspapers) and arts (fashion, local and regional art, music).  Students will be expected to develop their linguistic skills (description, narration, supporting opinion) and socio-cultural awareness while interacting with these varied types of texts.  Students will be allowed to work on individual texts & topics (with the instructors
permission) for their final project.  This is a one semester course.
There would be customized lesson plans based on individual student needs.      

Fall
Advanced Bengali: Bengali Literature
This course is also to make students proficient in Bengali using literature extract as the contents.
Fall: Bengali Literature-The objective of this course is to develop the proficiency level of the students in all the four skills reading, writing and speaking &listening by using different genres of Bengali literature its course content (West Bengal and Bangladesh). Reading comprehension will be enhanced as students learn to understand authentic texts at the linguistic and cultural level while discussion (description, narration, supporting opinion) on issues related to these texts aim to hone the oral and written skills.  Students will be allowed to work on individual texts & topics (with the instructor’s permission) for their final project.  This is a one semester course.

Research and Teaching Interests:

Sanjukta has a keen interest in Bengali language, literature and culture. She has been involved in various literary and cultural activities in Bengali. She teaches Advanced Bengali courses that draw from novels, articles, films, music and other media and help students to develop an understanding and mastery of Bengali language, literature, culture and society over different periods of time.

She started working for University of Pennsylvania on various linguistics related projects from 2004. Before coming to Penn she completed her Masters on Human Resource Development from Villanova University and received certification for Teaching English as second language from University of Pennsylvania.

She specializes in second language acquisition skills and has taught English as second language for a federal government funded agency. From 2006 onwards she has been involved with various family literacy projects for a public school district in the state of Pennsylvania. She is also working on preparing online Bengali learning project funded by Federal Government as a Module Developer.