Digenis.org

On January 5th, President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced the National Security Language Initiative, “a plan to further strengthen national security and prosperity in the 21st century through education, especially in developing foreign language skills”. The languages to be studied in the plan include Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and other Central Asian languages. You can read the briefing transcript and the briefing transcript and the fact sheet at the US State Department website.

According to the site, the National Security Language Initiative has three broad goals:

Expand the number of Americans mastering critical need languages and start at a younger age by:

• Providing $24 million to create incentives to teach and study critical need languages in K-12 by re-focusing the Department of Education’s Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) grants.
• Building continuous programs of study of critical need languages from kindergarten to university through a new $27 million program, which will start in 27 schools in the next year through DOD’s NSEP program and the Department of Education, and will likely expand to additional schools in future years.
• Providing State Department scholarships for summer, academic year/semester study abroad, and short-term opportunities for high school students studying critical need languages to up to 3,000 high school students by summer 2009.
• Expanding the State Department Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program, to allow 300 native speakers of critical need languages to come to the U.S. to teach in U.S. universities and schools in 2006-07.
• Establishing a new component in State’s Teacher Exchange Programs to annually assist 100 U.S. teachers of critical need languages to study abroad.
• Establishing DNI language study “feeder” programs, grants and initiatives with K-16 educational institutions to provide summer student and teacher immersion experiences, academic courses and curricula, and other resources for foreign language education in less commonly taught languages targeting 400 students and 400 teachers in 5 states in 2007 and up to 3,000 students and 3,000 teachers by 2011 in additional states.

Increase the number of advanced-level speakers of foreign languages, with an emphasis on critical needs languages by:

• Expanding the National Flagship Language Initiative to a $13.2 million program aiming to produce 2,000 advanced speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Central Asian languages by 2009.
• Increasing to up to 200 by 2008 the annual Gilman scholarships for financially-needy undergraduates to study critical need languages abroad.
• Creating new State Department summer immersion study programs for up to 275 university level students per year in critical need languages.
• Adding overseas language study to 150 U.S. Fulbright student scholarships annually.
• Increasing support for immersion language study centers abroad.

Increase the number of foreign language teachers and the resources for them by:

• Establishing a National Language Service Corps for Americans with proficiencies in critical languages to serve the nation by:

1. Working for the federal government; and/or
2. Serving in a Civilian Linguist Reserve Corps (CLRC); and/or
3. Joining a newly created Language Teacher Corps to teach languages in  our nation’s elementary, middle, and high schools.
This program will direct $14 million in FY07 with the goal of having 1,000 volunteers in the CLRC and 1,000 teachers in our schools before the end of the decade.

• Establishing a new $1 million nation-wide distance-education E-Learning Clearinghouse through the Department of Education to deliver foreign language education resources to teachers and students across the country.

• Expand teacher-to-teacher seminars and training through a $3 million Department of Education effort to reach thousands of foreign language teachers in 2007.

Also proposed in the initiative is a National Language Service Corps, designed to encourage foreign language speakers to work for the federal government, and a Language Teacher Corps, which would place speakers as language teachers in an elementary, middle or high school).