Thread: US Promotes Early Teaching of Foreign Languages

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washi ... languages/

US promotes early teaching of foreign languages
By Sue Pleming | January 5, 2006

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Confronting a dire shortage of U.S. foreign language speakers, the Bush administration on Thursday announced a plan to boost teaching of "critical" languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi and Farsi.

State Department officials said the National Security Language Initiative was aimed at getting children involved in learning foreign languages from kindergarten and at funding more programs through university-level and beyond.

"Our goal is in essence to ramp up the mastery of these critical languages, not solely for national security reasons but also in terms of America's standing in the world," said Assistant Secretary of State Barry Lowenkron.

The White House will ask Congress for $114 million in the 2007 budget to initiate the plan, involving a number of agencies including the Education and Defense Departments.

"We view this as serious seed money to get this thing launched," said Lowenkron. Some of the money would be used directly to fund teaching in schools and some for more advanced learning abroad.

Especially since the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon, CIA and other agencies have bemoaned a shortage of experts in Arabic and other "exotic languages," especially for translating security information.

Memories are still fresh of two messages intercepted from suspected members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network on September 10, 2001, that said, "Tomorrow is zero hour," and "The match begins tomorrow." They were translated on September 11 and only given to policy-makers on September 12.

Lowenkron said fewer than two percent of high school students in the United States studied Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Farsi, Urdu, Korean, or Japanese combined.

Assistant Secretary of State Dina Powell said the United States was way behind other nations in language training.

"In order to effectively communicate our values around the world, it matters how many languages you can communicate in. Clearly this is a major public diplomacy priority," said Powell.

In a separate program the Pentagon said it intended to spend $750 million over five years beginning in fiscal 2007, which starts October 1, on efforts to increase foreign language proficiency within the military.

U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been complicated by the fact that nearly all the U.S. personnel serving there do not speak or understand the local languages.

(Additional reporting by Will Dunham

This is for you Bootsie- "press 2 for Farsi"

Jah, das ist zehr gut - oder ach du meine gutte?

Okay - and why not Gaelic? with so many Irish and scottish descendents in this country - why not teach this language.

Jah, das ist zehr gut - oder ach du meine gutte?

Okay - and why not Gaelic? with so many Irish and scottish descendents in this country - why not teach this language.

Now, when are they going to start a program to teach immigrants English at an early age?

Instead of Spanish only like I understand some states still do.

Wonder why they didn't even MENTION SPANISH??? I guess that is just a GIVEN. They don't NEED to encourage THAT because they are cramming SPANISH down our throats. At least, there are CHOICES with the other languages.