PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS (Alphabetical by Author)

Jayne Abrate, JNCL/NCLIS
Languages and the National Interests
Email
Events at the beginning of the 21st Century have convinced U.S. policy makers that our nation has to speak other languages and understand other cultures. A number of national policies and initiatives have already been advanced. Will this national demand dictate educational supply? Can the language community adequately and effectively respond to the broad number of national interests requiring immediate and long-term attention?

Mahmoud Al-Batal, Emory University
Title:
The drastic increase in Arabic enrollments nationwide in the past four years has posed serious challenges in a number of areas, including teacher training, placement, assessment and evaluation, and curriculum development. These challenges underscore the need for a national language policy for Arabic as part of a comprehensive language policy in the US.

This presentation addresses the challenges facing the Arabic teaching profession and outlines key components of a language policy for Arabic.

Roger Allen, University of Pennsylvania
Arabic Flavor of the Moment: Whence, Why, and How?
Email - Website
As what has been dubbed a less commonly taught language, the profile of goals and methods that has governed Arabic teaching and learning is somewhat different from that of other foreign languages. In the post-9/11 era, that has become both more and less the case than before. I shall therefore try to place current trends into a very brief historical context before exploring issues connected with Arabic-language instruction today and the vexed question as to goals and principles involved in the application of such language-competence when we are dealing with the nation’s current no 1 desideratum in foreign language-learning.

Richard D. Brecht, University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language
A Coherent U.S. Language Education Design and Policy: Rationale and Overview
To address comprehensively all U.S. language needs, a reconceptualization of the missions and design of language programming is required, particularly for higher education, together with major policy decision involving requirements, outsourcing and articulation.
Furthermore, national language education planning is necessary, incorporating bother “universal” as well as “selective” language
Educational policy.

Donna Christian, Center for Applied Linguistics
Charting a Path to Bilingualism: Policy and Practice Support
Email
While the U.S. needs language resources to meet its diplomatic, economic, security, and social goals, linguistic diversity in U.S. schools remains a growing concern. This presentation will discuss a unified response to these issues—policies and practices that support the creation of pathways for individual students through the educational system that lead them to bilingualism, including developments in two-way immersion and heritage language education.

Dan Davidson, American Councils
An Examination of Second Language Learning Careers of American Students based on Outcomes Measurements at the School-to-College, Junior-Year Abroad, and Flagship-Levels
Email
The present study compares measured L-2 levels of graduating high school seniors, undergraduate junior year abroad students, and Flagship Program students of Russian, for the purpose of providing baseline data on expected proficiency levels for U. S. students of world languages at key junctures in the U S. educational system in three proficiency-based modalities: listening, reading, and speaking. The 2370 subjects in the present study represent 226 American colleges and universities, ranging from small private liberal arts institutions to large public research universities. No single institution accounts for more than 5% of the total subject population. Findings are of potential interest to SLA researchers, policy makers, curriculum developers, teachers and students focused on problems of adult second language acquisition at the advanced and superior levels.

Kees de Bot, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Foreign Languages in a New World
Language teaching methodology has to change to adapt to new perceptions of what learning is taking into account both learners' and teachers' views on what constitutes language learning. Learning word lists and grammar rules is not attractive and in particular young learners' learning styles move away from that type of rote-learning, filling pupils with knowledge kinds of approach. The foreign language has to be acquired as a byproduct of some other activity rather than being the focus of learning.

Rick Donato, University of Pittsburgh
Foreign Language Education Policy: A Grassroots Perspective
This presentation will speculate on what language education policy might include based on longitudinal research on designing, monitoring, and evaluating early foreign language learning programs in school settings.

Research findings on program outcomes, attitudes of various stakeholders, and the challenges and successes of early language learning programs will inform a grassroots perspective on a national language education policy.

Janis Jensen, New Jersey Department of Education, National Network for Early Language Learning,
National Foreign Language Policy: A State Language Coordinator’s Perspective
Email - Website
This presentation will focus on the implementation of K-12 foreign language programs in a state that has mandated the study of foreign languages since 1996 through a K-8 and high school graduation requirement. Critical issues impacting program implementation will be discussed, specifically, state policy, standards-based reform initiatives, funding, and teacher education.

June K. Phillips, Weber State University
Foreign Language Education: Whose Definition?
Email
Foreign language professionals define their field in terms of theory, research, and practice; policy makers define it in terms of political or national issues. The U.S., at the federal and state levels, has rarely created policies explicitly aimed at the establishment of a language educational policy. More commonly, the case has been that language education has felt the impact of policies developed for education at large. How has the profession dealt positively with the freedom gained by being on the outside? How has it struggled when that freedom has resulted in marginalizing programs?

Tim McNamara, University of Melbourne, Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Title:
Language assessment in foreign language education: the struggle over constructs. The information sought about learners through processes of assessment can be used for educational and/or policy purposes. What happens when these purposes are in conflict? This paper discusses the issue of values in language assessment, and the increasing potential for a clash between educational and policy imperatives, and gives examples from Europe and Australia relevant to the emerging situation in the United States.

Sally Magnan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, French & Italian
The Unfulfilled Promise of Language Teaching for Communicative Competence
Over the past 30 years, the profession has taught languages primarily for self-expression and cultural awareness. Has the focus on personalization undermined the analytical distance needed for cultural understanding? Has technology misdirected language teaching goals? What possibilities does our current environment of political pressure for language study and academy's orientation toward interdisciplinarity offer for reconsidering the goals and methods of language teaching in an international arena?

Mary L Pratt, New York University, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Title:
Email
My paper will review some of the legislative proposals and policy initiatives currently on the table in the government, examining the conceptions of language needs and language learning they assert or assume. I am particularly interested in an emergent vocabulary about language as a weapon, and language programs as weapons programs. I consider the gap between security related approaches based on the violent, destructive powers of language, and linguistic theories which overwhelmingly work with communicative and cooperative models, sometimes idealistically.

Elaine Tennant, University of California, Berkeley, German
The Ugly American Redux: LCTLs, NDEAs and the Educational Value of Language Learning
The linguistic profile of the US has changed a lot in the last fifty years, increasing its needs for a multilingual citizenry. For decades the defense requirement for speakers with foreign language competencies has greatly determined which less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) were taught and how at American educational institutions. This defense need for foreign language speakers, however, is only one part of a current and growing national need for Americans to be able speak languages in addition to English. The situation of LCTL programs in the US is a useful vantage point from which to consider some of the effects that defense-oriented federal funding has had on language learning in the US since Sputnik. The introduction of a national policy on languages could stabilize the existing capacity of American academic institutions to provide instruction in LCTLs and the cultures they represent, thus enabling them to provide more coherent programs of language instruction to meet both domestic and defense needs. Implementation of such a policy, however, could have significant, not necessarily welcome, impacts on the priorities of many US educational institutions. My presentation will consider some of these issues in terms of institutional priorities and the up’s and down’s of LCTLs at Berkeley in the last couple of decades.

Terrence G. Wiley, Arizona State University, Division of Education
Mending Broken Connections in Foreign and Heritage Language Education
Email
In the U.S., there is a growing rift between languages being spoken in the general population and languages being taught. Moreover, although projections on global language futures indicate that English will continue to grow, other major languages are projected to grow and gain regional and international influence as well. Thus, there is an urgent need for Americans to learn languages in addition to English and to capitalize on the untapped linguistic resources in this society. Unfortunately, a quarter century after the late Senate Paul Simon wrote the Tongue-Tied American, the arguments for greater emphasis on foreign and heritage language education are more cogent today than when his book was originally released.

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