While there are many difficulties faced by world language educators, both teachers and students of certain languages--languages commonly identified with countries and cultures deemed to be hostile to the United States--often find themselves in uniquely paradoxical situations. This article begins with a brief anecdotal description of the personal…

The U.S. government encourages the study of critical languages spoken in geographic areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security and the global economy through a variety of discretionary grants and scholarship programs. U.S. students are traditionally underrepresented in the study of these languages; however, many of the nation's K-12…

GLASPORT first convened in October 2009 with funding provided by a Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) grant. The grant proposal was submitted by then Glastonbury Assistant Superintendent of Schools (and former Foreign Language Director) Christine Brown. The committee was charged with two ambitious objectives: (1) to aid in the development…

Maloney Interdistrict Magnet School (MIMS) is the only elementary school in Waterbury that has a world language program and is one of only two elementary Japanese programs in Connecticut. In the past 15 years, more than 1500 students have participated in its Japanese Language and Culture (JLC) Program in grades Prekindergarten through 5th. The JLC…

GPARS is a generalized transition network system designed for language study by both students and researchers. It generalizes the Augmented Transition Network formalism by allowing top-down, bottom-up, depth-first, breadth-first, determininistic, and nondeterministic parsing strategies to be freely intermixed. (26 references) (Author/LB)

A Modern Language Association survey of enrollment trends in U.S. colleges found that Spanish, French, and German remain the three most popular language courses. Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic have shown greatest increases between 1960-95. The Less Commonly Taught Languages project provides information, including instructional materials and web…

Bilingualism and bilingual education in the U.S.S.R., the People's Republic of China, and Canada are discussed as a context for examining American attitudes toward and the establishment of bilingual education programs. Russian and minority languages in the Soviet Union are examined, including the early development of Soviet language policy,…

This report presents information on 51 current innovative foreign language projects and programs for grades K-12. Information was collected by means of a year-long, national survey of continuing language programs, which involved announcements in journals, newsletters, and other publications; form letters to program supervisors; an ERIC search; a…

Responses to the 1990 United States census question concerning languages other than English that are spoken at home are summarized. It was found that in 1990, 14 percent of the population 5 years and older spoke a language other than English at home, as contrasted with 11 percent in 1980. Languages spoken most commonly at home in descending order…

Advocates national policy of multiculturalism and multilingualism, acquired through cohesive use of a common language (English) spoken by all Australians, yet retaining and incorporating the more than 20 major languages presently in use. Suggests provisions for efficient teaching of English and encouragement of all other community languages,…

In response to rapidly falling foreign language enrollments, the State University of New York College at New Paltz designed and actively promoted a language immersion program in the summer of 1981. The program consisted of instruction in twelve languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian,…