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i 

45–828 2009

[H.A.S.C. No. 110–175] 

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE’S WORK WITH 

STATES, UNIVERSITIES, AND STUDENTS 

TO TRANSFORM THE NATION’S FOREIGN LANGUAGE CAPACITY 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

HEARING HELD 

SEPTEMBER 23, 2008 
(II) 

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman 

JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina 

LORETTA SANCHEZ, California 

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California 

ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey 

SUSAN A. DAVIS, California 

JIM COOPER, Tennessee 

HANK JOHNSON, Georgia 

JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania 

W. TODD AKIN, Missouri 

ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland 

WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina 

JEFF MILLER, Florida 

PHIL GINGREY, Georgia 

K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas 

GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky 

JOHN KRUSE, Professional Staff Member 

THOMAS HAWLEY, Professional Staff Member 

SASHA ROGERS, Research Assistant 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS 

2008 

Page 

HEARING: 

Tuesday, September 23, 2008, Department of Defense’s Work with States, 

Universities, and Students to Transform the Nation’s Foreign Language 

Capacity ................................................................................................................ 1 

APPENDIX: 

Tuesday, September 23, 2008 ................................................................................. 31 

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2008 

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE’S WORK WITH STATES, UNIVERSITIES, 

AND STUDENTS TO TRANSFORM THE NATION’S FOREIGN LANGUAGE CAPACITY 

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS 

Akin, Hon. W. Todd, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee ............................................................. 25 

Miller, Hon. George, a Representative from California, Chairman, Committee 

on Education and Labor ...................................................................................... 2 

Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman, Oversight 

and Investigations Subcommittee ....................................................................... 1 

WITNESSES 

Bourgerie, Dr. Dana S., Associate Professor of Chinese, Director, The National Chinese Flagship Center, Brigham Young University ........................... 8 

Givens, Dr. Terri E., Frank C. Erwin, Jr., Centennial Honors Professor, 

Vice Provost, University of Texas, Austin .......................................................... 6 

Slater, Dr. Robert O., Director, National Security Education Program, Department of Defense .................................................................................................... 4 

Walker, Dr. Galal, Professor of Chinese, Director, National East Asian Languages Resource Center and Chinese Flagship Center, Ohio State University ......................................................................................................................... 10 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS: 

Akin, Hon. W. Todd .......................................................................................... 37 

Bourgerie, Dr. Dana S. ..................................................................................... 96 

Givens, Dr. Terri E. .......................................................................................... 62 

Slater, Dr. Robert O. ........................................................................................ 39 

Snyder, Hon. Vic ............................................................................................... 35 
Page

IV 

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD: 

[There were no Documents submitted.] 

WITNESS RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ASKED DURING THE HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.] 

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING: 

Dr. Snyder ......................................................................................................... 117 
(1) 

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE’S WORK WITH STATES, UNIVERSITIES, AND STUDENTS TO TRANSFORM THE NATION’S FOREIGN LANGUAGE CAPACITY 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE, Washington, DC, Tuesday, September 23, 2008. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:07 a.m. in room 

2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Vic Snyder (chairman 

of the subcommittee) presiding. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. VIC SNYDER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

Dr. SNYDER. We will go ahead and get started. My Ranking 

Member Mr. Akin said that he wanted us to go ahead and get 

started, that the Republicans are caucusing and thinks he will be 

a little bit later, but he should be joining us shortly. 

Good morning. Welcome to the Subcommittee on Oversight and 

Investigations hearings on the goals and directions of the Department of Defense’s (DOD) efforts to improve its language and cultural awareness capabilities. Today’s session is the third in a series 

of hearings that were examining efforts to improve the foreign language, cultural awareness and regional expertise capabilities of the 

United States general purpose military forces. Witnesses at both 

the previous hearings noted that the U.S. population is generally 

marked by a lack of foreign language skills, a notable exception 

being those skills found in recent immigrant communities. 

So where does that put us? Well, it puts us in a situation where 

the Department of Defense and the American people and the folks 

who care about our national security know—we certainly learned 

this last decade—that we need foreign language skills and cultural 

awareness to achieve our national security objectives, and we expect the DOD to be able to meet those needs. However, they have 

inherited a national problem, and you all as well, better than anyone else, knows that we Americans are not very good at foreign 

languages. And so we expect the DOD to meet these foreign language needs, and yet, starting at early ages, most Americans don’t 

venture into the kinds of languages that it turns out that we may 

need for our national security purposes. 

So we are asking DOD to solve this problem for us, when, in fact, 

it is a national problem. And as you all are going to testify today, 

we actually now have Department of Defense dollars going in some 

states for K–12 education programs because the DOD has recognized that these problems may only be solved by starting at very, 
2 

very young ages. The key programs we will be discussing today include DOD’s National Security Education Program, or NSEP; the 

Interagency National Security Language Initiative, NSLI; the National Language Service Corps (NLSC); the Flagship Program; and 

the State Language Education Roadmaps or Strategies. 

We are joined today by four great witnesses: Dr. Robert Slater, 

who joined the National Security Education Program in 1992 and 

has served as its director since 1996. Dr. Slater had a key role in 

the language of both the Language Flagship and the National Language Service Corps. As a director of NSEP, he also serves on the 

National Security Education Board. 

Dr. Terri Givens is the Frank C. Erwin, Jr., Centennial Honors 

Professor and vice provost at the University of Texas at Austin 

(UT). Texas-Austin is one of three Arabic Flagship Centers, and it 

is also the sole Hindi/Urdu Flagship Center. 

Dr. Dana Bourgerie—did I say that, Dr. Bourgerie, correctly—is 

an associate professor of Chinese and the director of the Chinese 

Flagship Center at Brigham Young University (BYU). His research 

interests include dialect studies, and he has published an article on 

computer-aided learning for Chinese. 

Dr. Galal Walker is professor of Chinese and Director of the National East Asian Languages Resource Center and Chinese Flagship Center at Ohio State University (OSU). Ohio State University, 

along with Brigham Young University, is one of four Chinese Flagship Centers. 

Welcome to all of you here today. We appreciate your presence. 

When Mr. Akin comes, we will give him a chance to make an opening statement. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the Appendix on page 35.] 

Dr. SNYDER. But I am also very, very pleased today that we are 

joined by Congressman George Miller from California, who is the 

Chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, and Rush Holt, 

who is a member of that committee, to participate. And Chairman 

Miller will have to leave shortly, but Dr. Holt is going to be staying 

with us for a while. But I really appreciate their attendance because both these men understand that this is a national—a national problem, not just a DOD problem. And I want to recognize 

Chairman Miller for any comments he would like to make. 

STATEMENT OF HON. GEORGE MILLER, A REPRESENTATIVE 

FROM CALIFORNIA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION 

AND LABOR 

Mr. MILLER OF CALIFORNIA. Well, thank you very much. And 

thank you for having this hearing and inviting our participation 

from the Education and Labor Committee. We have tried since I 

have become Chair of the committee to work with other committees 

and sort of forget the jurisdictional lines and see if there is things 

that we can do to complement one another. And clearly the witnesses you have before us today can tell us a lot about the opportunities for young people to learn languages, and to become proficient 

in those languages and perhaps even develop careers using those 

foreign languages. 
3 

I am not sure that many young people understand that possibility. Foreign language study seems more like a burden than an 

opportunity. And I think just as sometimes we think about developing career ladders in so many other fields, we have to show them 

that there is a career ladder that is available here, and one that 

is probably getting better and more attractive all of the time with 

the globalization of the world and our economy. 

Obviously we believe this is very important on the committee. 

During this Congress we have tried to put some emphasis on this 

under the leadership of Representative Rush Holt. We have supported investments in this area, including the Foreign Language 

Assistance Program, which provides grants to establish and improve and expand innovative foreign language programs in the K– 

12 students, and also developing, again under his leadership, the 

idea that we would have international education that focuses on 

foreign languages and area studies with respect to diplomacy and 

national security and trade competitiveness, that we would put an 

emphasis on that in the Higher Education Act that was just 

passed. We would also put an emphasis on foreign languages with 

respect to understanding science and technology. And again, that 

was in the Higher Education Act. Under Mr. Holt’s leadership, 

those were successful programs with bipartisan support, and also 

his initiative to create a new Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Education within the Department. I think it starts to 

show the kind of shift that we are doing. 

But we also know there is a great deal to learn from the Department of Defense and from other agencies of the government that 

not only put a value on foreign language, but essentially need the 

skills and the talents of these individuals. And we hope to be able 

to work with you when we do No Child Left Behind, the reauthorization of that act next year, because again, we are getting an 

awful lot of people coming to us and telling us this is a very important place to reemphasize foreign language studies and competencies, and that will also be done under the leadership of Rush 

Holt, who has really, really done remarkable work on our committee to bring a sense of urgency and importance to this matter 

as we have gone through the reauthorizations as he did with higher ed. And we look forward to that in No Child Left Behind. 

Thank you again for including us. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for being here, and we 

appreciate your comments. 

Before we begin your opening statements, the staff and folks who 

have been here before are very familiar with these two anecdotes 

that I am going to share because we showed the tapes at the first 

hearing, but it is the contrasting between Senator Inouye’s World 

War II experience in Germany with a man named Guy Gabaldon, 

who was in the Pacific theater. And I talked to Senator Inouye 

about this, and it was in the Ken Burns World War II story. But 

he came upon a wounded German, and they were trying to communicate with each other, and he said neither one of them spoke each 

other’s language. And at some point this wounded German reached 

in his coat, and Senator Inouye killed him with the butt of his rifle, 

and as he hit him, the man’s hands flew with a photograph of his 

family. He was reaching in his coat to bring out pictures of his fam-
4 

ily. And Senator Inouye in this Ken Burns film talks about how he 

had to go get counseling for that because here was this man who 

was just trying to share with him his family, but he didn’t share 

the German language. 

Guy Gabaldon was recruited by the Marines in the early 1940’s 

because he spoke some Japanese. He had picked it up from Japanese friends as a teenager in the neighborhood he was in, and he 

ended up in one of the islands. And, of course, we all have this illusion that the Japanese would never surrender, but because of his 

Japanese language skill he learned as a kid in the streets and the 

orchards where they were doing work, he got over 1,500 Japanese 

soldiers to surrender, and he did it on his own. He would go to the 

mouths of caves, holler at them in Japanese, they would come out 

and surrender, and he would—in one night—he did this mostly at 

night—he stumbled into a regimental headquarters and got 800 

Japanese soldiers to surrender at one time. So that is 1,500 Japanese that are still alive. But think of the numbers of Americans 

who would have died if that had gone the way everything else had 

gone on those islands that were held by the Japanese. 

So these are very real issues, and the needs are different now of 

our military, but when we talk about the role of foreign language 

in our military forces, if you are the person that is doing street patrols, this is not some academic exercise. These can be the kinds 

of misunderstandings that can lead to people getting killed. 

So I appreciate you all being here today. Dr. Slater, we will begin 

with you. 

Oh, Rush, would you like to—I will be glad to recognize you, 

Rush, for any comments you would like to make. Rush Holt. 

Dr. HOLT. No, thank you. I appreciate Chairman Miller’s remarks, and I will join in the discussion with the witnesses. Thank 

you. 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Slater, we will begin with you. What we will do 

is we will put on this clock, and it will go green and then yellow, 

and then it turns red at the end of five minutes. But we want you 

to share with us any thoughts that you have. 

All four of you gave fairly lengthy written statements. If you 

were to actually read those word for word, we will be here until 

Friday. But I know that you intend—we appreciate the fact—I 

have read them, and the staff has read them, and we appreciate 

your thoroughness. They are very helpful, But obviously you are 

not going to do that today. But if you have other things you need 

to tell us after the red light goes on, feel free to share those with 

us. But I know Members will have questions. 

Dr. Slater, we will begin with you. 

STATEMENT OF DR. ROBERT O. SLATER, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY EDUCATION PROGRAM, DEPARTMENT OF 

DEFENSE 

Dr. SLATER. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, members of the distinguished committee, Congressman Holt, Congressman Miller. 

Thanks for the opportunity to speak with you today. 

The National Security Education Program represents a critical 

piece of the puzzle in how we address our longstanding national 

deficit in languages and cultures critical not only to our national 
5 

security, but to our broader national well-being. Since 1994, NSEP, 

has engaged in the national effort to expand opportunities for 

Americans to develop proficiencies in critical languages and to ensure that the federal sector has access to this extraordinary talent. 

More than 1,200 NSEP award recipients have and continue to 

serve in positions related to U.S. National security throughout the 

federal sector. In fact, just a few minutes from here up the street, 

we have about 125 of our former scholars and fellows meeting with 

35 representatives of 35 federal agencies to talk about jobs in the 

Federal Government all morning. 

As Director of NSEP almost since its inception in 1992, I feel 

compelled to note that the DOD leadership’s very ambitious goals 

of the defense language transformation plan have been enormously 

successful in expanding NSEP’s capacity to influence the educational process not only in U.S. higher education, but also in K– 

12. My testimony focuses on three of six major NSEP efforts: Language Flagships, State Language Roadmaps, and the National Language Service Corps. Each of these represents an important shift 

in paradigm as we endeavor to make available to the Nation a new 

generation of globally proficient professionals. 

Just a few words about the Language Flagship. Just a few years 

ago, we started an experimental grant program with four universities. Today we have expanded to 20, accompanied by 3 K–12 national models and 8 overseas emergent programs involved in what 

is the first systematic national effort to develop and implement 

higher education infrastructures whose objective is to graduate university students at what we call the superior professional or level 

3 level of proficiency in critical languages. 

Flagship represents the most ambitious and aggressive effort to 

date to transform language education in the U.S., and we are committed to a goal of at least 2,000 enrolled students by the end of 

the decade. In fact, the results we are seeing today are quite remarkable. We are receiving the results of formal proficiency testing 

right now of a group of recent Flagship fellows. Remarkably, these 

fellows are testing at levels we ordinarily don’t see; not only at the 

superior level three, but at level four. We expect in the coming 

years an expanded array of Flagship institutions across the Nation 

will be producing undergraduate students who routinely graduate 

at this level and beyond. 

Flagship is an important part of a broader effort to transform 

U.S. education. We are building our higher education models on 

the shoulders of simply what must become a more robust K–12 language education system through the U.S. To that end, DOD, 

through Flagship and as a partner in the National Security Language Initiative, agreed to sponsor three national models of articulated K–16 instruction. Our hope is that a vital expanded K–12 effort proposed for the Department of Education will receive funding 

from Congress in the future. 

The second program to mention briefly is the concept of state 

roadmaps for language. DOD tasked NSEP to sponsor a series of 

state strategic planning efforts that would systematically explore 

the demand for language skills within each state and develop a 

roadmap to address these needs. We identified the three states: 
6 

Ohio, Oregon and Texas. You will hear more about them later from 

my colleagues. 

With this funding, an initiative began in June 2007, followed by 

a series of state-level working groups. The projects moved to their 

next level with the publication last October of three language roadmaps. Each state is now engaged in efforts to implement key components of that strategy. 

The third program mentioned briefly is the pilot National Language Service Corps. When we consider the critical issue of surge 

capacity in the federal sector, DOD included, we see the language 

corps as an integral part of that solution. Simply stated, the Department of Defense, as well as the entire Federal Government, 

cannot reasonably expect it to ever possess the wide range of language capabilities that may be necessary to address immediate or 

emergency surge requirements. The NLSC is designed to address 

this need by providing and maintaining a readily available civilian 

corps of certified expertise in languages. The corps will maintain a 

roster of individuals, American citizens, with certified language 

skills who are readily available in time of war or national emergency or other national needs. 

We are poised at this point to move ahead with active recruitment of members and planned operational exercises with our partners in the Centers For Disease Control, the U.S. Pacific Command 

and the Defense Intelligence Agency. 

I look forward to answering any other questions you may have 

on those three programs or anything else that we are undertaking 

as part of the National Security Education Program. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Dr. Slater. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Slater can be found in the Appendix on page 39.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Givens. 

STATEMENT OF DR. TERRI E. GIVENS, FRANK C. ERWIN, JR., 

CENTENNIAL HONORS PROFESSOR, VICE PROVOST, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN 

Dr. GIVENS. Mr. Chairman and members of this distinguished 

committee, greetings from the great state of Texas. And on behalf 

of the administration at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, 

thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. 

The University of Texas at Austin is one of the leaders in education abroad and language education in the United States. We are 

currently ranked third among doctoral research institutions, with 

2,244 students studying abroad, And we teach a broad range of languages and area studies at our university, many of them topranked programs. I will focus my remarks today on our Flagship 

programs and the Texas Language Roadmap. 

The University of Texas at Austin has received funding for two 

language Flagship programs from the National Security Education 

Program. The Hindi/Urdu Flagship (HUF) currently has 15 students, and the Arabic Flagship has had 39 students. This program 

is an important source of funding for our brightest students who 

have an interest in intensive language study. The Hindi/Urdu Flagship at UT is the sole language Flagship program dedicated to this 

pair of languages. 
7 

Building on a long history of teaching South Asian languages 

and cultures at UT, HUF is responding to a newly perceived national need to change the paradigm of language learning in the 

U.S. by developing new pedagogical approaches, a new type of curriculum and a new focus on the Flagship goal of producing global 

professionals, graduates whose linguistic skills will make them 

highly effective in a range of professional capacities. 

The Arabic Flagship program at UT provides training in Arabic 

language and culture at the undergraduate level. The program is 

unique in several ways. The first is that our program is embedded 

within the department of Middle Eastern studies, enabling us to 

offer a very wide range of Arabic language and content courses. UT 

Austin has the largest Arabic faculty in the country. 

A second factor that makes our program unique is that the majority of our students are nonheritage students. This means that 

we are able to target and recruit students based on academic talent, language aptitude and commitment. 

Another key difference is that students have the opportunity to 

take content courses in a wide range of subjects, and these are all 

taught in Arabic. 

The Flagship mission is not just to create a small pool of welltrained students, but instead to change the face of language teaching across the country. We are taking the lead in a wide range of 

projects to provide leadership to the Arabic teaching community. 

This year we will be focusing on K–12 outreach, testing and assessment, and upgrading our website to become a valuable resource for 

learners of Arabic. 

A final goal of our program that we have had great success with 

is the creation of the next generation of Arabic language teachers. 

We have recruited many of the top graduate students in the country, who provide classroom assistance, work on research projects 

and take our program forward. 

In February 2007, the University of Texas at Austin was selected 

as one of three institutions around the country to participate in the 

federally funded U.S. Language Summits project. The first phase 

of this project culminated in a language summit at UT in October 

of 2007 in the development of a language roadmap. 

In the spring of 2008, I was asked to continue the project in 

order to develop an advisory board that would work with the state 

of Texas to develop the ideas outlined in the language summit. We 

currently have five high-profile members of the advisory board, and 

we are currently working with the Austin Chamber of Commerce 

to develop ties to the business community. The main focus of the 

initiative will be to develop and fund pilot language projects in elementary schools working toward legislation that would increase requirements for language training for K–12 and provide broader 

funding for K–12 language initiatives. 

Another highly recognized program at UT, the UTeach Program, 

which is an innovative program to develop high school teachers as 

teacher certification for the following languages in the state of 

Texas: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Latin, Russian, 

Spanish. And the most popular of these are Spanish, followed by 

French and Japanese. 
8 

Looking toward the future, the University of Texas at Austin is 

pleased with the progress we have made thus far to support our 

students and faculty in language study and providing opportunities 

for study abroad; however, we cannot be complacent, and we must 

continually strive to find ways to keep pace with the needs of our 

country into the future. This means that universities must pay attention and be involved in what is happening in K–12 education 

not only in Texas, but in efforts that are developing nationwide. If 

critical languages aren’t being taught in high schools, there will be 

a shortage of students capable of entering the Flagship programs; 

therefore, programs like the Language Roadmap are crucial to providing opportunities for teachers who will then provide the students who will enter the Flagship programs. 

In a sense, universities working with business, government and 

education leaders can be a linchpin in ensuring that our country’s 

needs for critical languages are met, but we must have the foresight to create the partnerships that will provide the funding for 

these programs into the future. As a university, we have been willing to put resources into these efforts, and we are pleased to work 

with the state and Congress on programs like the Language Flagships and Language Roadmap that will provide the business people, intelligence analysts, and teachers who are critical to our country’s future. I strongly support Dr. Slater’s hope that Congress will 

agree to fund an expanded effort led by the Department of Education to build a national network of K–12 programs in critical languages. 

Again, thank you for this opportunity, and I look forward to answering your question. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Dr. Givens. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Givens can be found in the Appendix on page 62.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Bourgerie. 

STATEMENT OF DR. DANA S. BOURGERIE, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CHINESE, DIRECTOR, THE NATIONAL CHINESE 

FLAGSHIP CENTER, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY 

Dr. BOURGERIE. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, members of this distinguished committee, Chairman Miller, Congressman Holt, I am 

very happy to be here today and speak with you a little bit about 

the Brigham Young University (BYU) Flagship program, some of 

the things we are doing in the state of Utah. Our Flagship program 

was initiated in fall 2002 as one of the original four programs. We 

are now beginning our eighth year of operation and just accepted 

our seventh cohort this fall. BYU has a long history of strong 

English programs. Our undergraduate annual enrollments in Chinese are now over 1,600. Building on other strong existing Chinese 

programs, we have been able to infuse a level of innovation that 

did not exist before we had the Flagship program. The mission 

statement encompasses the goals and the aims of the program; that 

is, the Chinese Flagship program seeks to prepare students for careers related to China. The program’s aim is to provide participants 

with the linguistic cultural skills necessary and cultural skills necessary to realize the professional goal within a Chinese environment. 
9 

All this we do with mission in mind and each phase of the program is designed to take the student to the next level—to that professional level of proficiency, but it has several supporting objectives. Raising the general proficiency to advanced or superior or 

level 3/3+, increasing capabilities in specialized professional communication tasks, providing general and domain related cultural 

training. We also are the—we are the managing Flagship for managing an overseas program that I refer to more in my written testimony. 

After seven years and six cohorts, the program has begun to 

produce just the kind of students it was designed to train, as Dr. 

Slater has noted as well. Last year, standardized testing for Cohort 

five yielded seven superior ratings, that is the 3/3+ range, five advanced ratings and most importantly, graduates are working a 

wide range of fields related to China, including 12 in the U.S. Government positions, including State, various other agencies, Commerce and so on. I would like next to just talk a little bit about 

our K–12 partnership, because that was raised as well. As is the 

case throughout much of the country, Chinese enrollments have 

burgeoned in Utah in the last five years. 

Although still a small percentage of total foreign language enrollments, the number of students studying Chinese in Utah has 

grown substantially from 183 in 2003 to 1,215 in 2007, with a projected enrollment of 3,000 to 3,500 in 2008. In 2003, fewer than six 

high schools had Chinese programs in Utah. In 2008, there will be 

74 secondary school programs and there will be starting with the 

2009/2010 year 10 dual language emerging schools for the K–12 

level. These state-based incentives have allowed the BYU Flagship 

program to focus on curriculum development, assessment, support 

and teacher training on how to—and we have used recently allocated K–12 linkage funds from NSEP to respond to specific requests from the world languages unit in individual districts. 

The first of these is the K–12 is a distance program for teaching 

Chinese called enhanced Educational Network (EDNET). Now in 

the second year, the EDNET broadcasts on the Utah education network and serves 34 sections and 28 high schools. It is a blended 

distance model. That is where they have an interactive experience 

with a master teacher and then there are local facilitators who 

speak Chinese. Another important effort in the K–12 domain has 

been our Start Talking (STARTALK) program. For the last two 

years, our center has sponsored this DOD-funded program on a residential intensive language program for high school students. 

STARTALK plays two distinct roles in our K–12 strategy. 

First, it exposes more students to Chinese earlier and helps bolster high school enrollments. In addition, the program is a recruitment ground for flagship programs later on. In 2008, our second 

year of the program, we expanded from our 2007 numbers significantly to serve 60 high school students. Moreover, the teacher 

training component enrolled 18 secondary teachers and prospective 

teachers. This ongoing professional development workshop series 

helps address the critical need for qualified K–12 teachers in the 

state of Utah. 

Lastly, I just would like to mention just a little bit about our 

summit. We had the summit among our Flagship states just last 
10 

week. In addition to this, recent specific collaborations with the 

state of Utah, the Department of Education as I just noted, we 

have the Flagship center with a core organizer of the Utah governor’s language summit just last week on the 16th. The state took 

full charge of the summit collaborating with NSEP and drawing on 

their expertise from previous language summits. Governor Jon 

Huntsman gave his direct support to the effort as in previous language summits in Ohio, Texas and Oregon. 

The gathering brought together representatives from business, 

education, industry and government to begin a dialogue toward a 

language roadmap for the state of Utah. Speakers and participants, 

including the governor himself, Jon Huntsman, Dr. David Chu, 

some of the Senate leaders, also key participants, the head of the 

governor’s economic development office and the head of the Utah 

world trade organization. The summit was the first step toward developing a language policy for the state of Utah. Smaller working 

groups currently being formed to draft a formal statement on language policy based on the outcome of the language summit is follow-up research. These results we brought forward as recommendations to the Utah international education summit to be held in January. 

The Flagship program at BYU and its partners across the country have clearly begun to effect deep change in the language field. 

Flagship programs are increasingly looked to for as role models or 

language pedagogy and its directors as national leaders. In my 20 

years of language-teaching experience, this is probably the most 

far-reaching of anything that I have yet witnessed. I thank you for 

the opportunity to address this committee and I look forward to answering any questions you may have. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Dr. Bourgerie. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Bourgerie can be found in the 

Appendix on page 96.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Walker. 

STATEMENT OF DR. GALAL WALKER, PROFESSOR OF CHINESE, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES RESOURCE CENTER AND CHINESE FLAGSHIP CENTER, OHIO 

STATE UNIVERSITY 

Dr. WALKER. Chairman Snyder, Congressman Bartlett, Congressman Miller and Congressman Holt, as unaccustomed as I am to 

being brief, I am very pleased to speak with you on behalf of the 

Ohio State Chinese Flagship program. I hope my written statement 

and comments here reflect some of the excitement and resolve 

around the changes in the ways those of us in Ohio are thinking 

and acting about foreign language and culture training. I would 

also like to convey the important roles of the national security education program, the language Flagship, in driving these changes. 

The biggest impact of the Chinese Flagship program on Chinese 

language study in Ohio is the raised expectation. We have been 

able to demonstrate time and again that expecting excellence and 

then working to achieve it leads to demonstrable improvements in 

foreign language education. 

Five years ago, we did not have the capacity to provide our students with the sequences of study and training that consistently 
11 

led to the advanced proficiencies in Chinese. We had a good number of students who would reach advanced levels, but those levels 

were largely reached after formal programs of study were completed and were hit and miss depending on the ability of the students to pursue a language study on their own. Now we have a 

consistent stream of young people who demonstrate advanced 

knowledge and skills not only by testing at Interagency Language 

Roundtable (ILR) Level three and above, but also by engaging in 

genuinely difficult tasks requiring sophisticated language abilities. 

This past week, Rue Burns, an undergraduate political science 

major, came to us from George Washington University, completed 

his master thesis on a new social class in China by defending it in 

a public forum attended by his teachers in Columbus and a panel 

of Chinese sociologists in Qingdao. 

In a video conference session that run over two hours, Burns presented his thesis, responded to criticism and discussed revision, 

earning a pass from his teachers and praise from the Chinese 

scholars who are clearly interested in what this young American 

had to say about their society. This kind of session is a regular 

event in the OSU Chinese Flagship program. When a predominantly nonheritage undergraduate and graduate students observe 

the high level of performance of students who are only a year or 

two ahead of them, they see what is expected of them and they are 

eager to rise to the challenge. The Chinese Flagship program is 

also raising the expectations of our university. If Chinese students 

can consistently reach advanced levels of proficiency, why not other 

languages? We are now discussing an institute of advanced language study where students of other languages will be challenged 

by the same expectation. 

By building the Chinese Flagship program into the degree structure of the university, we are confident that the changes we have 

implemented through the support of the NSEP will remain with 

the Chinese program and create a strong potential to spread to 

other languages. The support of national security education program has permitted us to create innovative approaches to training 

our students to the advance level. Among these are the integration 

of language study and content. During the OSU Chinese Flagship 

program, our students progressed from studying the language and 

culture to studying in the language and culture by means of course 

content that prepares them to intellectually engage Chinese counterparts through a program of mentors with domain knowledge 

that is focused on developing a research addenda, our students 

quickly become used to the idea that they are going to learn concept ideas and perspectives that they would not encounter if they 

did not have the language ability. From the beginning, we frame 

language instruction in Chinese culture in making sure that the 

students actually perceive the way Chinese present their intentions. Later, we expose them to Chinese commonsense so that they 

know it when they see it later on. 

From the culture, we engage them in community, a large part 

that we deal with in our center in Qingdao, which I mention in the 

written statement and which you might talk about later on. We are 

now in the process of expanding the number of undergraduates in 

our Chinese Flagship program. And the state of Ohio has recently 
12 

made anyone eligible for G.I. Benefits eligible for in-state tuition 

rates. We hope that we are going to attract graduates who have left 

the service, graduates of the Defense Language Institute and other 

such backgrounds. 

I am going to talk in the last 40 seconds about the roadmap. We 

had a meeting on June 28, 2007 of about 85 citizens of Ohio who 

got together and discussed in kind of a fast-paced daylong meeting 

the issues of—the needs and resources for languages in Ohio. This 

resulted eventually in the production of the roadmap team, which 

was produced by citizens from that group, mostly dominated by 

business and government—people from business and government. 

We are continuing with that, these roadmaps—these design teams 

are meeting and just recently we had meetings of 12 of 13 public 

universities in Ohio to meet about implementing these findings of 

the roadmap. We have learned a lot from our friends in business 

and government and public service. Language and culture skills 

are equally important. Language must be combined with work related knowledge. 

And access to language instruction must be broadened and the 

delivery of the instructions made relevant to the workplace. We 

also learned that there is a valuable reserve of people in our community who have substantial experience and knowledge of foreign 

languages and cultures and they are willing to share that with 

their fellow citizens. This is my favorite takeaway from the language summit and roadmap activities in Ohio. Thank you for the 

opportunity and I will be happy to answer any questions. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Walker is retained in the committee files and can be viewed upon request.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you all for your testimony. What we will do 

is we try to follow our five minute clock here pretty strictly for us. 

So I will take five minutes and then go to Mr. Bartlett and then 

without objection we will let Chairman Miller and Dr. Holt participate. Dr. Slater, I want to spend my first five minutes here and 

have you do a thumbnail tutorial for all of us who are hearing 

about some of this for the first time and are watching on the television. I want to talk about the Flagship centers and the language 

roadmap. And then on the language roadmap, when we have two 

of the three states here that were funded with DOD money—Utah 

was not, but Texas, Ohio—and Oregon is the third language roadmap state. Now, give me the one-minute summary of that. Was 

that predominantly DOD money that went to fund that program? 

Describe that for us, please. 

Dr. SLATER. Yes. It was all one-year money that was made available from Congress to the Department of Defense, which, in turn, 

asked National Security Education Program to develop an effort to 

look at the issue of working with the states. Primarily we believe 

that if we are going to change the language education system in 

the United States, we really need to build it at the local and state 

level. That is where change occurs in education. 

Dr. SNYDER. So essentially they all came together—was it Dr. 

Walker that—in describing the summit, that you essentially funded 

a summit in which they discussed what they need in their state for 

language needs? 
13 

Dr. SLATER. We funded each of the Flagship centers at UT Austin, at Ohio State, University of Oregon to take the leadership role 

in building first the process, which convened a summit. Now, the 

interesting part about the summit as an educator I can say this, 

is we challenged them to bring in the demand side. Educators don’t 

always listen so well. So we asked them to sit in the back and listen to the demand side, talk about what the needs are in the state 

for language across the state for socioeconomic reasons, for boosting 

the economy. From that summit, they each formed a set of working 

groups that took the lessons learned from the summit and built an 

actual strategic plan that we called a roadmap over the next six 

months, released that roadmap and now each state is working at 

their own pace and at their own meaningful level for that state on 

various pieces of that strategic plan to try to adopt it. 

Dr. SNYDER. Has the original DOD money played out in those 

three states? 

Dr. SLATER. The original funding has. Through the Flagship centers, we provided them with a little additional funding to maintain 

some momentum. But at this point, most of the federal funding has 

been completed. 

Dr. SNYDER. One final question on that and then I want to go 

to the Flagship centers. It is my understanding that there are 

other states—Utah apparently is an example—that think it is such 

a hot idea, they are doing it without federal dollars, they are trying 

to do it on their own. Do you think it would help the cause if the 

Congress were to find a way to fund additional language roadmaps 

with that one-time money? 

Dr. SLATER. We would like actually to see 51 of them, including 

the District of Columbia. That would be a major advance, yes. 

Dr. SNYDER. Yeah. And then I want to ask about the Flagship 

centers. And I think in your written statement you talk about the 

growing number and you project have a lot more. That is not entirely DOD money there, correct? And would you describe the funding for that? And then how does one become a Flagship center? 

Dr. SLATER. What we talk about actually—what I talk about actually in my statement is the number we would project through 

DOD funding. Because what we see in the long run—— 

Dr. SNYDER. All the federal dollars are DOD for those Flagship 

centers, is that what you are saying? 

Dr. SLATER. Excuse me? 

Dr. SNYDER. All the federal dollars of that projection for Flagship 

centers is DOD dollars, no Department of Education? 

Dr. SLATER. That is correct. We hope that other universities and 

expect other universities to begin to build Flagship-type programs 

that are independent of our funding. And we are seeing some interest in that happening now. But what we talk about in my testimony and report is the response that we are working on directly 

with DOD funding. 

Dr. SNYDER. And if I am a college in central Arkansas, how do 

I become a Flagship center? 

Dr. SLATER. We actually have an annual request for proposals 

that we call diffusion of innovation, which invites universities to 

partner with one of our Flagship centers. And we will help them 

and fund them to develop the curriculum that would implement 
14 

that. We added four universities this year. That is the main vehicle 

we intend to use to add new universities to that. So a university 

in that case, we would ask them—we would connect them to a 

Flagship center. They would work together and develop a curriculum at that level. 

Dr. SNYDER. And that is ongoing funding, DOD funding; is that 

correct? 

Dr. SLATER. Correct. 

Dr. SNYDER. That is good. Mr. Bartlett for five minutes. 

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much and thank you for holding 

this series of hearings. I am enormously supportive of our military 

focusing more on languages and culture. And I think that we have 

great difficulty in communicating with these other peoples because 

we do not understand their culture, we cannot speak their language. Seventy percent of all communication is said to be nonverbal. If all you know about the language is what you have 

learned in a textbook, you have already lost 70 percent of all the 

communication when you talk to these people. And I think that our 

military ought to be spending more effort on this. And if we did, 

I think we might have less needs for guns and ammunition because 

this understanding each other, I think we might have less wars in 

the future. 

I am very envious of those who speak another language. I see little three-year-olds that are fluent in two languages and I worked 

really hard to try and learn a second language quite unsuccessfully 

through high school and college. I am told that when a child is 

three years old, they know half of all the things they will ever 

know. If you think about what a three-year-old knows, that is not 

too hard to understand, is it? You know, we work really hard to 

try to get our people proficient in a foreign language when we wait 

to start till college. If you wait to start until high school, it—and 

I am glad that the chairman of our education committee is here. 

If we are really going to be successful in this, we have got to immerse them in this foreign language from birth up. It is just so 

easy when you do that. We teach English when you are in school. 

We are not learning the English language when we teach English. 

We are learning about the language and its structure and so forth. 

How do we start this cycle? Our magnificent arrogance has in the 

past kept us from focusing on foreign languages. When I went to 

college, one of my fellow students there was from Iran. That wasn’t 

a bad name then. And she spoke 14 languages. She said after the 

first half dozen, it was pretty easy because of all the similarities 

in the languages. How do we immerse our kids in these foreign languages from the very beginning? I see these little three-year-olds, 

they don’t know a noun from an object or anything else, but they 

speak the languages. How do we start this cycle? Once it is started 

and the parents speak a second language, they will if they are patriotic Americans immerse their kids in a second language because 

the world has really shrunk and we need to know these other languages. But how do we start it? If we wait until kindergarten, it 

is too late. They are already about twice the age when they know 

half the things they will ever know. How do we start early? 

Dr. WALKER. We do some of that. To answer your question directly, what we are trying to do—we are developing a curriculum 
15 

for K–12 or pre-K. We haven’t gotten down to age three yet. But 

the idea is to build a curriculum where basically essentially where 

the children learn to play in another language. You teach them 

how to exist and how to manipulate their way through an environment, maybe just a classroom. And they learn to play, they learn 

to relate to other kids and their teachers in the language and just 

maintain that over a period of time. The important thing about language training at the early age is sustaining it all the way through. 

Very often we have language programs that start out very well and 

children will develop a capacity in the language and then they will 

find out that they can’t continue that in the middle school or in the 

high school. And that to me is a huge waste of a resource. But, 

Congressman Bartlett, I think you hit on a very important thing. 

When we have these little children and they are in a situation 

where they can learn a language, a second language, it really is, 

it truly is a national resource and it is a resource that has a 

timeline on it. We won’t be able—we won’t be able to teach them 

the same way and to the same degree of competence later on in 

their life. 

Mr. BARTLETT. Why can’t we start in the crib with interactive 

television? 

Dr. SLATER. Well, interesting comment. And this is an area that 

we really do need to explore more and pique the entrepreneurial 

spirit of the American pre-K system, which is generally private and 

not public. At our Oregon language summit, we had a lengthy conversation with a proprietor of a large national chain of pre-K programs. Language sells at that level. 

So we need to figure out a way to develop more programs that 

attract kids at the pre-K level. Now, the key, as Galal mentioned 

that I want to add, is that what we do very poorly is take what 

we build on and make sure that the children continue their progression. And I often say it is like—the way we treat languages in 

K–12 is like offering a child a math curriculum in elementary 

school and when they get to middle school, say we are sorry, we 

have nothing to offer you, all we can do is duplicate what you did 

in first through sixth, wait until you get to high school and then 

maybe we will build on it. That is what we do. 

So if you are going to invest in the pre-K, you have to have a 

system in place that then takes advantage of that ability and 

builds on it throughout the remaining 12 or 13 years of school life 

or it is a wasted investment. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Miller for five minutes. 

Mr. MILLER OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. I am going to pick up 

there, Dr. Slater, if I might. Two things that always worried me 

in my years of education is sustainability and replication. And usually along the way between those two issues you lose quality rather 

rapidly. And my question is—and this is just out of ignorance of 

the program—you just described what we do in mathematics, 

which is a horror show, because we either repeat over and over 

things that are very disjointed when we see how they are presented 

here. You have a lot of discussion here in each of your presentations about the professional development of teachers. And it 

seems to me that success in teaching language sort of like success 

in teaching math, the depth of knowledge and comfort of the teach-
16 

er has a lot to do with the ability to find acceptance among the students because you are able to differentiate your instructions, your 

guidances, your suggestions and the rest of that. If you are just 

barely ahead of your students, there is not much you can do to help 

them when you are in trouble. 

So I would just like to know what you—and you have a number 

of programs here both directed at teachers and in the classroom. 

And I would like to know just how you maintain this quality, sustainability and replication. 

Dr. SLATER. And I might let my colleagues share some thoughts 

on the teacher education issue. Flagship generally is not engaged 

directly in teacher development, although I would add that we 

spend a lot of time in the Flagship program making sure that everybody who is teaching in it is an expert in how to teach languages. This is a real—but you put your finger on exactly the primary issue for the American education system, which as you know 

much better than I do, extends way beyond just teaching language. 

It is teaching all the fields. How we effectively develop a core of 

teachers across the United States who are effective in actually 

teaching language is a critical challenge. 

We don’t have that problem in Flagship because each university 

is investing. When we enter an arrangement with a university, we 

insist that they designate old time tenure track lines in the languages to the program we are funding. 

So they are committed to that. But I think you might want to 

hear from the other universities in how they are looking at the 

teacher training issue, which is really the one that worries us. If 

you are asking me what keeps me up at night, it is where we are 

going to find all these teachers to—— 

Mr. MILLER OF CALIFORNIA. You mentioned in Utah you went 

from 5 to 74 schools. That is an applause line, except I don’t know 

the quality of the teachers in the other 69 schools. 

Dr. BOURGERIE. Right, right. I mean, that is a good point and I 

think it deserves a little bit of explanation. Now, that is an array 

of a variety of programs that includes our distance program, which 

reaches out to, I think, 24 schools. And that is one of the ways we 

can do it. We brought in a small number of visiting teachers from 

the national—the Hanban teacher. We don’t see that as a longterm solution but as a short-term with other trained teachers. And 

we actually were involved in training them to work in a U.S. context because they weren’t used to that. 

And then we have our EDNET teachers. And we draw from 

those—we have been developing these apprentice teachers for the 

last several years through this program. So it is really a multifaceted approach. But I want to say too, that it is a serious problem. Because it is not just finding enough, it is finding ones that 

really get it and are committed to the sort of instruction we have 

been talking about here. That true in all languages, but especially 

true in some of these critical languages that we deal with. 

Dr. GIVENS. You may have heard of our UTeach program. There 

has been a large emphasis on the math and sciences of course. But 

we are spreading that out. 

Mr. MILLER OF CALIFORNIA. You had them at a hearing actually. 
17 

Dr. GIVENS. And we have actually spread that to the languages 

because we recognize that there is such a strong need for language 

teachers, particularly in the critical languages. So we are trying to 

expand that model. It is also going into engineering. In general at 

the university, we see teacher training as one of the critical components of our mission. And so the UTeach program—unfortunately 

the language aspect doesn’t have nearly as much funding as the 

math and science and we are hoping to be able to increase that. 

But the other side of the equation is that, for example, they have 

chosen not to train any teachers in Russian because there aren’t 

any placements for them. And so that is why I think the roadmap 

is important, because we need to find the ways to actually create 

the placements for the teachers in the critical languages. So it is 

really very much connected and we need to focus on all the different aspects. 

Mr. MILLER OF CALIFORNIA. Just one quick question. Are the 

graduate students, are they given a stipend? Are they given a 

scholarship? Are they identified as we do in math and science— 

through the National Science Foundation, people are given stipends to get through the program? 

Dr. GIVENS. Some are, yeah. 

Dr. BOURGERIE. All of ours get at least some funding. 

Mr. MILLER OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you. Dr. Holt for five minutes. 

Dr. HOLT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you for allowing 

me to join you today. Let me first ask about the ground rules. Are 

we likely to have another round of questioning? 

Dr. SNYDER. Yes. 

Dr. HOLT. Good. Anyway, thank you for doing this. And, Dr. 

Slater, Givens, Bourgerie and Walker, thanks for very good testimony. The Chair began with some anecdotes about why it is needed. I got heavily involved in this, well, earlier this decade when I 

was sitting in the Intelligence Committee listening to some special 

forces types who were saying that they were combing the hills looking for Osama bin Laden. And I said when you talk with the local 

people, you know, what do you learn. And they said actually we are 

limited there. We picked up some since we have been out there. 

And it really drove home the national security need here. 

Certainly it is easy to imagine interrogation nuances missed and 

insurgencies not quelled and lives lost. Looking at it more positively, we are making progress and we by investing in this, it 

seems we are not only enhancing national security, but we are really enriching our society. Something that has become apparent is 

veterans are facing higher levels of unemployment than the cohort 

that hasn’t served their country in uniform, which is not only a disgrace, but sort of hard to believe. 

And there was a news item on the radio this morning. Well, 

okay, so what good does machine gunner training do you in the job 

market and all of the various people trained in high tech warfare? 

Well, certainly the more people who come out of the service with 

fluency and competency in languages, the more useful they will be 

and more successful they will be in the marketplace. I am pleased 

to see the good progress. I mean, I followed the David Boren undergraduate and graduate fellowships and the Flagship programs and 
18 

the heritage speaking programs. I have visited STARTALK programs. And the statistics about the growth of these programs are 

impressive and the raised expectations are so encouraging. 

We see it in school boards and among school principals and elsewhere. So I think we are on the right track, but there is just so 

much more to do. 

Let me turn to a few questions, if I may. Dr. Slater, say a little 

more about the statistics of what happens to the NSEP graduates 

and over the long-term, where do you think they will end up? 

Dr. SLATER. As you know, every individual who is funded by our 

program incurs a unique requirement that they seek—must make 

a good faith effort to seek work in a national security-related position in the Federal Government. That is a requirement. We don’t 

promise them a job. But they have certain advantages in terms of 

special hiring authorities and we have staff that actually assists 

them in finding jobs. We keep—because it is a requirement, we obviously keep careful statistics on them. The key, I think, that I always point out to people is the selection process is first based on 

motivation to want to work for the Federal Government. So we already have a cohort that comes in, perhaps with too high an expectation that they are going to go right from the end of the program 

or graduation to ambassador positions. 

Dr. SLATER. So we have to temper their expectations somehow to 

understand that there is a progression and a career from beginning 

to that level. 

Once we get beyond that, we have an enormous level of success 

in getting students in. The three primary organizations they work 

in are the Department of Defense, Department of State, and the intelligence—the various agencies of the intelligence community. Almost two-thirds of them wind up in one of those agencies. But we 

have had 52 students, for example, complete their service or working their service requirement in International Trade Administration, Department of Commerce, as another example. We have had 

about 1,250 students to date. The pipeline at any one time has 

about 700 and 800 students seeking jobs. 

We are always looking for better ways to do it. As much as I 

would like to think the Federal Government is a simple process in 

finding jobs, it is not. The security clearance process can often 

delay an individual’s actually coming into the government by a 

year or two. So we deal with lots of impediments in this process. 

But that is generally the numbers and track we have. 

Next year, the Department of Defense is initiating a new professional development program where we are hiring approximately 20 

a year into the Department and in 2-year internship positions. So 

we are making a lot of advances in that area. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mrs. Davis for five minutes. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I am sorry I missed your earlier testimony, but maybe I can pick 

up on some of what you have said. 

One of the things you just mentioned is that even though you 

have these alumni, they are not able to get a fast track into a civilian job, into a government job. And it seems to me that that might 

be a good place to look for a process that we ought to be doing. We 

know, my goodness, I mean, anybody who wants to even work at 
19 

the VA or anywhere has to go through a very long process, even 

if they have a specialty that is sorely needed. So it may be that in 

this area as well, there needs to be some way of taking a look at 

that. So I would be happy to see if you need anything from us, 

please, we might want to really make certain that you send a very 

direct message that anybody who goes through that program ought 

not to wait around for a year because by the time they get picked 

up by that agency who really needs them, they are off doing something else. So that is really critical. 

I am wondering whether you have had some thoughts as well, we 

have talked here in the Armed Services Committee about capturing 

those individuals who have gone over to Iraq, Afghanistan, ended 

up playing roles very different from what they had trained for, but 

they developed and found that they had some skills. Are you taking 

a look at that pool of individuals who have come back and are looking for, whether it is even in teaching or in language acquisition 

where they have a start and they could continue to build on that? 

How extensively are we tracking those individuals? 

Dr. SLATER. That is an excellent question, and I think we certainly need to do more in that area. I would give two answers to 

that. One is—I think is, we started to work with all the Flagship 

centers. As I think Galal mentioned the new GI bill is certainly 

going to—this is a new generation of military that have been exposed to many languages and cultures that they were not exposed 

to in their earlier education; they are going to be returning over 

the next several years with a new interest in pursuing language 

study and culture study, and we would like to make sure that the 

universities are positioned to capitalize on that in the education 

process. So we were thrilled when Ohio decided that they would 

waive out-of-state tuition for individuals with that, and we would 

like other universities and states to follow suit with that so that 

we can capitalize on that. 

The other issue is the National Language Service Corps. We 

have an enormous diversity of talent in this country which we do 

not use, and that population you are talking about is one very important piece of that group. We see the Language Corps as an organization that can capture these people, put them to use, give them 

an opportunity to maintain and advance their language, and then 

serve the country and, eventually, state and local needs with that. 

So there are things. But you are absolutely right, we need to 

think more about other avenues for them as well. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. I think what we would hope and look 

for is some kind of a real plan that would begin to do this, and that 

would build on our native language speakers that are in the country. I know even in the San Diego community, there are many people who have the ability to help and really weren’t encouraged at 

all to do that. So we need to map all that help in some better way, 

and I think we really want to be helpful in that regard. The people 

who are returning are basically, a lot of them are here, and so we 

can’t wait too much longer, I think, to have that kind of plan that 

works. 

The other thing I would just ask you in any time really left. In 

your experience looking over globally, I guess, to the language programs in foreign countries that actually have done an exceptional 
20 

job of reaching very young children and beyond; clearly, I mean, if 

you are living in Europe and you have exposure, that is going to 

be very different for young children, but there are other possibilities. I know, as someone living in Japan many, many years ago, 

children loved to come by our house just to hear us speak English, 

and they were learning a little bit in school. 

What is it that we should be looking at beyond some of the programs? I have seen great immersion programs here in our country, 

and certainly San Diego has had some that are very successful. But 

is there anything that we can tap into that you have seen that 

really is quite different than our approach? 

Dr. SLATER. Well, our approach is unique. We are, frankly, out 

to lunch on our approach. We talk to our European colleagues 

about learning from them what they do in languages. They say: We 

can’t teach you anything, because by the time our students get to 

university they are done studying languages because they have 

done it. 

It is doing a better job in early education. It is dual immersion 

programs. We have enormous opportunities to build on populations 

that speak other languages as a first language and capitalize on 

that by communities building on that and building dual immersion 

programs, which not only enrich language learning but enrich 

learning in general in the schools. And the performance data we 

have suggests that performance in general across the curriculum is 

better. That is what we need to be doing. We can’t defer this to the 

university. 

Our sense in Flagship is we want to challenge universities to 

take an advanced placement student in language and build on that 

to the higher level. But they should be already coming to the university with a facility in a second language. And that is what—so 

we can’t learn a lot from other systems because they look at us and 

say: You are doing it backwards. And so that is what fundamentally needs to change. 

Dr. WALKER. It sounds pretty good to me. But I do think that the 

one thing that we really need to pay attention to when we establish 

these programs is just the extended of sequence of instruction. And 

I don’t want—again, just to repeat, don’t waste the resource of having children up to a certain level in the language, and then for 

some reason or other, have them lose that. That I think is what 

we want to avoid. 

Dr. SNYDER. We will go another round here. I want to hear from 

the three of you about the federal funding. If each one of you could 

talk first about the—I guess I want you to critique Dr. Slater’s program, and ignore him. Pretend he is not here. 

How easy has it been to work with regard to federal funding? 

How important has it been to you? I don’t want to go away from 

here if, in fact, the tail wags the dog. Is it a small part of your activity? Would each of you talk about that in terms of the accountability, how important federal dollars are? Can you use more, et 

cetera? I know the answer to that question. Go ahead. 

Dr. GIVENS. Yes. Well, we have had a very good working relationship with Bob, and that is not just because he is sitting here. 
21 

The funding has been very important because it is actually, even 

though we have one of the largest Arabic teaching faculties, it still 

allowed us—— 

Dr. SNYDER. If I may interrupt. If you would distinguish, is funding important for the roadmap before your flagships? 

Dr. GIVENS. Both. Let me talk about as focusing on the Flagship 

first. 

So it has been very important. Well, for one thing it allowed us 

to develop new curriculum in pedagogies that have been very effective in getting students to a much higher level of proficiency than 

the traditional ways of doing it in the past. And so really, working 

with the Flagship program has had a major impact on our curriculum on getting students actually into the countries where they 

can really immerse themselves in the language and so on. I think 

it has really helped us to move our pedagogy and curriculum forward in a way that we might not otherwise have done. So I think 

the federal funding has really been a key to moving our programs 

forward both in Hindi, Urdu, and Arabic. 

And then in terms of the language roadmap, the federal funding 

basically kicked us in the rear and got us doing something that we 

might not otherwise have done, which is to really get a dialogue 

going across the state on this particular issue in a more focused 

way. It is not that these issues aren’t already being discussed in 

the state of Texas, but it really has helped us to focus in and to 

support legislation that is already out there at the state level and 

to work with a group of people from government and business and 

education to try and come up with ways to get at these K–12 issues 

in particular. 

Dr. BOURGERIE. I think it obviously has been very important to 

us. Again, we have a very strong language program traditionally. 

But even with that, as I said in my other remarks, that it has 

helped us to really change fundamentally what we do. It has also 

brought so many more students into the higher levels and, more recently, into the K–12 collaboration. 

Utah is a little different in several ways. We don’t have a K–12 

center, per se, but we have been given linkage funding and we 

have a lot of energy at the state level coming to us and saying, how 

can we partner? And obviously, I think if this is going to go well 

all around the country, there has to be lots of partnerships. There 

has to be partnerships between the states, the Federal Government, local governments. And that is, I think, we are seeing in a 

lot of the Flagship context right now. 

It has been extraordinarily important to get the infrastructure 

up that serves us well now, including the local infrastructure, but 

also the centers abroad which have served all the Flagship programs. And those have been fundamental to getting done what we 

want to get done at the advanced level. 

On the summit level, I should say that even though ours was 

funded by the state of Utah, very enthusiastically, I might add, we 

still benefit from the other three. We were able to look at their 

roadmaps. And had those not been done, I think it would have 

been hard for us to get the kind of enthusiasm that we did get in 

our summit and onward toward a language roadmap. 
22 

I should also say that we did have some in-kind in-step support 

as well. Bob came up and donated a facilitator and some of the organizers to our group in Utah as well. So it has been important, 

and I really don’t think we could have made this breakthrough 

without substantial help in that way. 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Walker. 

Dr. WALKER. One of the things that the NSEP funding particularly has done has allowed us to really focus on our results, to take 

a target and say that is what we are working toward, that is what 

we are going to get. In a way, in the past we already had those 

goals in mind, but we didn’t have the resources to put in place and 

to constantly reach those goals. 

We have been allowed to engage in a lot of innovations. We have 

had funding, say, to develop an online assessment program that we 

can use to build electronic portfolios for our students, where our 

students can be evaluated from—by people anywhere, in China, 

here, and other universities. This is something that we wouldn’t 

have been able to do. We have a center, the centers abroad in 

Nanjing and Qingdao. These are constant resources that we can 

send our students to, to get them working in the actual communities in China. When students return to us from those places, they 

come with experiences that students before them never had before. 

They have interacted with Chinese on all levels, from the neighborhood, even to interacting with officials in conducting community 

service projects that involved a wide range of people. 

And finally, the roadmap. I would say, for us, it allowed us—it 

brought us in to take our discussion of what we are doing in foreign language and culture and put it in the context of the people 

around us, the businesses and the people in government who 

have—sometimes, especially the people in government public service desperate needs for a language, sometimes its life and death. 

But in business, they have their own way of looking at the issue. 

A lot of times they do not perceive a need for language because it 

is so far from their minds that this is going to be available that 

they don’t build it into their expectations. But once we start talking 

about it, we get a really good idea that they want the culture—language and culture, very important. And the language has to be involved with content that is professionally related. They have to be 

able to work in the languages. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Bartlett for five minutes. 

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you. 

I lived as a child during the Depression near a coal mining town 

in Western Pennsylvania. Most of the people worked in the coal 

mine were immigrants from European countries. I remember Little 

Italy as one of the streets in the little town I grew up near, and 

there were similar enclaves for those who came from Hungary and 

Czechoslovakia and so forth. 

My mother taught in the Americanization program for the WPA 

when the children of these immigrants were seeking to become 

American citizens because they came with their parents as children 

from overseas, I remember how proud the parents were that their 

children now spoke English and they really didn’t want their 

grandchildren to speak the native language because they were 
23 

Americans now. Now we have a multilingual country for which we 

are proud, and many see this as threatened by ‘‘English first.’’ 

I think we do an enormous disservice to our immigrants if we 

make it convenient for them not to learn English, because at least 

for the moment, English is the language of commerce in our country. If you don’t speak English, you are destined to work forever 

in entry-level jobs. But the world has really changed. And contrary 

to this culture that I grew up in where, if you spoke something else 

you weren’t an American, today I think it is very desirous that 

more and more of us speak more and more languages. 

Unless this is embedded in our culture, you are waging an uphill 

battle in the schools, because we have to see that as something coveted that we ought to be working for. How do we get the American 

people on board so that they value learning another language and 

really tell their kids, gee, we are looking forward to you speaking 

another language? How do we get our culture on board? It would 

make it a whole lot easier for you if we have them supporting you. 

Dr. BOURGERIE. I think, first of all, they are getting on board 

much more than they have been in the recent years. Just the bonus 

demand that parents put out there toward getting programs, we 

get a lot of that. Almost daily we get people saying, why don’t you 

do this? Why don’t you have a good program in kindergarten for 

my daughter or son? And this happens in a lot of places. 

So I think the good news is the demand is there. I think that we 

are not doing a perfect job of fulfilling it, but I think the demand 

is much more out there than we thought. 

I appreciate your comments. I grew up in a sort of bilingual situation, too. Not Chinese, by the way, but with French and English. 

And my parents were French speakers and I always felt that it was 

a good thing, that I was very proud of the fact that I knew another 

language. Not a lot of my friends thought that. I lived in an Eastern European neighborhood where most of them tried to bury that. 

I think the key thing here is, too, that we do mine that heritage 

community as well as the others that we have and give them added 

value for who they are and what they are. And I think there are 

some good things going on in that respect as well. 

Mr. BARTLETT. I am glad you are hearing that. I have been in 

Congress now for 16 years, and I have never had a constituent tell 

me, gee, we need to do more in learning foreign languages. So still 

I think, although you are hearing good things, I think we have a 

way to go before we really have our people on board and valuing 

this and pushing for it. 

Dr. BOURGERIE. Especially in key languages. We get daily calls 

in our center, many calls, saying when are you going to have—so 

maybe it varies from language and region, but I think there is 

some good news out there, too. 

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Bartlett, I am not sure all our constituents appreciate the national security aspects of this need, though, either. 

I think how significant it could be in the past and how significant 

it can be in the future. 

Mr. Miller for five minutes. 

Mr. MILLER OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. I am going to have to 

leave after this question; I have a leadership meeting. But thank 
24 

you very much for this hearing again, Mr. Chairman, and to the 

witnesses I hope to get back to the witnesses. 

If I might just ask one question. When we reauthorized No Child 

Left Behind and in the preliminary drafts and suggestions, we 

have been having this struggle over curriculum. There has been a 

popular belief that No Child Left Behind requires you to narrow 

your curriculum, teach to the test, dummy it down. Okay. Some 

people did and some people didn’t, and that is the case. 

My worry is that if we come on, we are going to have—people 

want us to introduce science into the testing languages into the 

testing. But, again, for most schools we will have something that 

looks like language, we will have a quick, inexpensive to grade 

multiple choice test that will look more like vocabulary than anything else, and we will be done with it. And I think that before we 

put this demand on school districts all over the country, we have 

got to have some sense of what the best practices are, what the 

best curriculum is, and what is the curriculum that drives the 

deepest learning and hopefully retention. 

You talked about creating this environment in the schools and 

engagement of these students and this learning at a very early age. 

I doubt there are many teachers who would be comfortable doing 

that unless it is sort of a rote prescription that we give teachers; 

when they don’t have the capacity, we then give them a prescription for each moment of their life in that classroom. And you now 

have some of these programs. 

What are you doing about back and forth on best practices and 

curriculum development so that the assessment doesn’t drive the 

curriculum, the curriculum drives the assessments? I know it is expensive, but it may very well be we get a better return on our dollar than what we are doing today. 

Dr. WALKER. Well, one thing I can say is that what we are looking for, especially in our K–5 curriculum or K–12 curriculum in 

total, is performance, performance features. For example, if a 

young person, let’s say a five-year-old or a six-year-old can do 

something in Chinese, we can make it a very limited amount of 

things that they are able to do. I would say there are about 10 

questions that an adult will ask a child in Chinese, so we can train 

the children to respond to those 10 questions pretty readily. But we 

can also focus what we want them to do and what we want them 

to respond to, to the environment around them. They are not too 

good at learning lists of things, but they are very good at learning 

how to do things. So I think what we need to do is sort of identify, 

what would we expect children at a particular level to be able to 

do? 

When we are designing our curriculum, we kind of try to avoid 

the grade-by-grade development. We have what we call the phase, 

phase one, phase two, phase three. And these are sort of designed 

on a parallel to sort of orchestra; beginning orchestra, intermediate 

orchestra, and advanced orchestra. So we feel that if a student 

wants to begin Chinese, just as if a student wants to start the 

French horn, they have to begin in phase one or beginning orchestra and work their way up. And we think that kind of thing, we 

can describe what is expected out of those different phases almost 

precisely. And a lot of this is just based on research about how chil-
25 

dren use languages. And if we teach—for example, we teach Chinese to kind of conform to how children use language, the fact that 

they will learn to do it, it seems to be much more assured. I don’t 

know if that answers your question. 

Mr. MILLER OF CALIFORNIA. That is helpful. I like the process. 

My concern is that we will end up with a federal mandate and very 

little capacity to carry out the mandate or an understanding of 

what we might do, the process you described as phase one, a lot 

of students could learn from their peers. There could be a lot of 

interaction, there could be a lot of basics that are learned. But my 

concern is that we go sort of—we go broad and we go thin and then 

we are happy. That doesn’t work in math, and it doesn’t appear 

that it works in language. 

Dr. SLATER. I think the fascinating part of the learning experience of these state language roadmaps tells us a lot about the process. We are not even close to a point where I would say we want 

a federal mandate for schools across the United States to teach 

Chinese or to teach Arabic or to teach French. What we found from 

the state—— 

Mr. MILLER OF CALIFORNIA. Let me tell you, there is a lot of people in the Congress who think we should have a federal mandate 

to teach language, and they would be real happy and check the box 

and move on. I think that has turned out to be a disaster. 

Dr. SLATER. What we are finding is every state is different. And 

it is not like teaching math. You may have a population, for example, in Texas where Spanish is the dominant language. That is a 

language where there is a need. You might find a Hmong population in Minnesota that can capitalize on that, an Arabic population in parts of Ohio that might. 

So we need a special kind of federal-state partnership in the language area that recognizes that reality, I would argue, as opposed 

to the mandate that we all teach languages, all say we have done 

our job and it is in everybody’s curriculum, and wind up with one 

or two successes and mostly mediocrity. I think that is—I think 

that is what I would argue is almost a given from our perspective. 

Dr. BOURGERIE. Real quickly. I think one of the bigger challenges 

in mind is not only the best practices but getting by from afield. 

You can put all that out there, but if there is a deep-seated paradigm against this quality teaching, you are nowhere. And I think 

we run into a lot of that, and that to me is even a bigger challenge 

of finding best practices. 

Mr. MILLER OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. Thank you again, Mr. 

Snyder. 

Dr. SNYDER. We have been joined by ranking member Mr. Akin. 

STATEMENT OF HON. W. TODD AKIN, A REPRESENTATIVE 

FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Chairman, I have a statement that I will submit 

for the record, and then just go ahead and pass to the other members who have been here and have questions. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Akin. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Akin can be found in the Appendix on page 37.] 
26 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Holt for five minutes. 

Dr. HOLT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And a very good hearing. 

I appreciate being included. 

Let me get several questions on the record, and if we can’t get 

answers orally, maybe you could submit later information. 

There is this term called critical languages, and needs of our Nation pop up. I mean, we should do a better job of, or maybe we 

should have known we needed more Arabic or we would have needed more Arabic, maybe we should have known we would need more 

Pashtu. But or maybe now we recognize or will recognize we need 

more Dari or Farsi. But how do we plan ahead? I mean, really, 

what is the—do we do a good job of defining critical in choosing the 

languages that we are going to support to anticipate future needs? 

And then a fundamental question really in any government program is how good are our metrics, our measurements? We talk 

about 3/4/4 or 3/3/3. Does that have any consistent meaning from 

school to school, from agency to agency? Is that the right way of 

measuring whether we are successful in any of these programs 

with the individual students? 

And then in the new pathways, Dr. Slater, you talk about meeting the needs of the language learners who wish to achieve professional proficiency and creating content-based curriculum for students in a variety of disciplines. I have been pushing for language 

programs that are combined with the science and technology, the 

science education, for example. Does that make sense? Is it working? Or should there just be language programs, and science students will take them if they want? Should they truly be integrated? 

Are there reasons to continue down that line based on our experiences so far? 

And the other question I was going to ask, although I think you 

have addressed it in response to Chairman Miller’s questions. The 

roadmap and the various articulated programs that are under development to take students from kindergarten through university 

languages, recognizing that students and families move around a 

lot and won’t always be in the Hmong Minnesota area or the Arabic Ohio area. Does it call for the dreaded national curriculum, national standards? I think you were all saying no, but I have to ask 

that question. 

So in the few minutes remaining here, let me throw it open to 

those questions. 

Dr. SLATER. Well, let me start and answer two of them and let 

my colleagues answer any of the others or duplicate. 

Critical languages, we are doing a better job. Five, 10 years ago 

there, we didn’t know what that meant. I think certainly within 

the Department of Defense, we now have a list of current need languages and trying to project out what the additional languages 

might be. So I think we have a sense. 

But I would always ask, critical for what? Critical for national 

security? Critical for intelligence? I think that there, we are getting 

a better handle on that. But there are many others. As we have 

learned in the state roadmap process, there are many other drivers 

in the country for critical languages. What does business need? 

What do we need to service local populations? So we need to do a 

better job. 
27 

That being said, there are always going to be languages that 

catch us unprepared. So like the language corps and some other 

mechanisms, we need to figure out ways to mobilize populations. 

In our exercise in the language corps with the Centers for Disease 

Control they ask for Marshallese. We have no Marshallese programs in the United States, but we do have significant populations 

of Marshallese. We need ways to be able to identify and bring that 

expertise to bear if there were a particular issue. Vietnamese was 

an issue post-Katrina. We need ways to develop approaches to that. 

So that, I would answer we still have a ways to go. 

The content-based issue that you raised, we are finding a lot of 

success. One of the main reasons students drop languages in particularly university level is because the language becomes irrelevant to them by the second year, by the time they are done with 

the requirement, because they are studying business, economics, 

political science, physics, and the language class is 17th century literature. And all of a sudden, the whole reason for studying languages escapes them. 

We are finding in Flagship, because the students have an opportunity to continue their language study as an integral part of their 

curriculum that they are staying with it, because of all a sudden 

they see that opportunity. So we are seeing a lot of successes. The 

diversity of our student enrollment is really quite extraordinary because of that. I think certainly at university level that is the way 

to go the to capture those students and keep them involved. 

Dr. HOLT. Thank you very much. 

Mr. Chairman, if you do get written answers to any of those 

questions, I would appreciate seeing them. 

Dr. SNYDER. Absolutely. 

Mrs. Davis for five minutes. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. 

You mentioned the Flagship program right now. Do you know, in 

that program students are directed toward government positions 

and other high-level positions? Is that correct? Right? 

Dr. SLATER. There are two pieces of Flagship. There is a postbaccalaureate program which we give fellowships. There are probably about 30, 35 fellowships awarded a year. They all are directed 

toward the Federal Government. They have a requirement. The undergraduate program is a much broader based program. They do 

not receive direct scholarship funding from us; therefore, they have 

no requirement, but we are working with all of them to provide 

them with information on federal careers. Many of them want to 

pursue that, so we are giving them information and getting federal 

career people out there to talk to them, to attract them to the federal. So we are working on that in two avenues. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Do you have, and perhaps in the 

other programs. I think what I am trying to wonder about is of 

those individuals who study language and they study at a high 

enough level that they can go on and do something with it, I had 

just some thoughts about trying to get people security clearances 

while they are in that first program, the beginning of it. But how 

many of those actually go into teaching? Do we know? 

Dr. BOURGERIE. I had a list that I didn’t share with you earlier. 

But our students, about 45 graduates, undergraduates recently, 12 
28 

of them are in Federal Government institutions in some way. We 

have people in China-based businesses. Some stay in China and 

work. We have two in medical school, for example, technology 

firms, several accounting firms, Commerce Department. Many 

other fields. And they are finding a place to use it. And as we mentioned before, often it is the second job that they get. Sometimes 

we have to encourage them to say as this comes along. We had a 

student just recently who had been working at KPMG not using his 

Chinese in Southern California. Now he was hired just recently 

with a firm that does almost their business in China. 

So I think you are seeing all sorts of different fields, depending 

on their interests. And that is really built into Congressman Holt’s 

question, too, that his domain or what we call domain is built into 

all the flagships. They have to do something besides their field. So 

they have to have Chinese and something. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Is it a concern that perhaps not a 

large enough number of those individuals actually do go into teaching, though, so that they can teach? 

Dr. BOURGERIE. I think this program has never had that as a 

target, though. There are lots of programs that target teachers and 

this doesn’t have that as a main target, although we have had a 

few who ended up in teaching. 

Dr. GIVENS. Our UTeach program does target those to go into 

teaching. It is a relatively new enough program that I don’t have 

the exact numbers how many have gotten placement. But that is 

a language specific program that is designed to have teachers who 

have the skills to teach even some of these critical languages. But 

it is not directly related to the Flagship. 

Dr. WALKER. That is the same. At Ohio State University, we 

have MA and Ph.D. level in Chinese language pedagogy or other 

language pedagogies, and those are people who are trained specifically to become teachers. People who are attracted to the NSEP, to 

the Flagship program are largely people who are interested actually in government service. Their dream is to come to Washington 

and have a career. This is one of the—so that is a clear distinction 

between those two groups of students. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Part of my concern is, of the universe 

of students who would even begin in the early grades, maybe get 

enough in middle school to go on to high school and then maybe 

into college and keep those skills, how many of them actually do 

go into teaching? What I am looking for is perhaps we need to 

know a little bit more about that pathway, and are there places 

along the pathway where we are not really doing enough work to 

encourage people to go into teaching, those who have the skills who 

could be great teachers in the field, because there are other enticements, like in anything today where it is difficult to get people to 

go into teaching if they are going to go into business or biological 

sciences, whatever that might be. 

And I don’t know whether we are doing enough to really make 

certain that we have a kind of pathway that is so enticing for 

teachers in language that we need to perhaps do more. And I think 

that is partly where the government funding comes into that and 

the assurances that there is going to be something at the end of 

the line. I think that school districts have a difficult time retaining 
29 

some of those programs, as we all know, and that is part of the rub 

here. 

Dr. WALKER. We could always do a better job of actually keeping 

track of our students. That is one of the main challenges, I think, 

facing all of us in this area of activity. In terms of, a lot of the 

times, getting people into teaching is not as big a problem as keeping them in teaching. And that is, I think, an issue that kind of 

goes, you know, is broader than us. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mrs. Davis. 

Thank you all for being here this morning. I think it has been 

very helpful. I want to formally thank Chairman George Miller and 

Rush Holt for joining us. They are not members of the House 

Armed Services Committee, but I asked if they would attend and 

they did, and they appreciate the work that you are doing. 

We have this formality of questions for the record. Members may 

have written questions they want to submit to you, and we appreciate you getting back your answers in a timely fashion. 

Let me also suggest, though, accepted as a question for the 

record: If there is anything you think that you forgot about or you 

would like to add on, or you get back and think that was the dumbest thing you said and you need to correct it, feel free to submit. 

Anything you sent us written in response to this question will be 

made a part of the record and will be shared with the other members. We appreciate you all for being here. And we are adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 11:43 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

A P P E N D I X 

SEPTEMBER 23, 2008 

PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD 

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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING 

SEPTEMBER 23, 2008 

(117) 

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY DR. SNYDER 

Dr. SNYDER. The sponsors for the state summits included the Departments of Defense, Labor, and Commerce. Why weren’t the Departments of State and Education 

included? 

Dr. SLATER. The State summits were designed to focus primarily on the economic 

and workforce needs for languages as distinct from needs based on national security 

and foreign affairs. Consequently, the Department of Defense reached out to the Departments of Commerce and Labor to cosponsor the summits. The Departments of 

Education and State were invited to send representatives to the summits and the 

Department of Education sent a senior representative to one of the summits. Because the State summits emphasized the articulation of needs at the local and State 

level, we were also careful to limit the involvement of Federal representatives in 

these efforts. 

Dr. SNYDER. Is the Office of Personnel Management involved at all with the NSLI, 

Flagships, or the NLSC? Does the National Security Professionals Initiative include 

requirements or encouragements for language and culture? 

Dr. SLATER. OPM has not had any direct involvement with the Flagships. However, efforts to establish procedures for hiring and activating members of the NLSC 

have been closely coordinated among OPM, the Defense Human Resource Activity, 

within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, 

and the Department’s Civilian Personnel Management Service. 

Dr. SNYDER. What can DOD and Congress do to facilitate the clearance process 

for NSEP graduates? 

Dr. SLATER. The Department has made significant progress in developing approaches to facilitating the clearance process for NSEP graduates. During 2008, 

DoD approved an approach that would allow NSEP award recipients to be processed 

for security clearances on a case-by-case basis, as soon as they have accepted their 

award instead of upon offer of a position. NSEP is working closely with key DoD 

organizations to develop a process that will implement this approach. It should provide opportunities for as many as 100 NSEP award recipients to gain security clearances each year well ahead of their job searches. 

The security clearance process does, however, remain daunting, particularly for 

NSEP award recipients who study in certain areas of the world. We need to continually strive for ways to ensure that appropriate security clearance processes are carried out while, at the same time, avoiding the loss of highly-talented individuals like 

those who are funded by NSEP. 

Dr. SNYDER. Recognizing that the DOD schools are generally ahead of their civilian counterparts in foreign language and cultural awareness instruction, what new 

programs are being considered for CONUS and OCONUS DOD schools on language 

and culture (K-12 articulation)? Is this a legitimate area for NSEP involvement? 

Dr. SLATER. NSEP has held discussions with representatives of the Department 

of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) on how United States based DoDEA schools 

can benefit from the Flagship K-12 pilot initiatives. For 2009, the Language Flagship is undertaking a review of all K-12 immersion programs. We intend to examine 

domestic and overseas DoDEA schools in this effort as well. 

DoDEA is actively pursuing efforts to support foreign language and cultural education. DoDEA’s foreign language program offers instruction in Arabic, Chinese, 

French, Korean, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish in its secondary 

schools. Some less commonly taught language courses are demographically localized 

to regions of the world where the language is spoken. Elementary programs include 

‘‘Foreign Language in Elementary School’’ in Spanish for K-3 in 62 schools and 11 

partial immersion programs in varying languages to include German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, and Spanish. DoDEA’s students study the history, culture, customs, 

traditions, and language of the host nation in which they live. 

Dr. SNYDER. What is the percentage of NSEP graduates who have entered federal 

service (1200 of how many?)? Does NSEP recruit or accept ROTC students? The 

Flagships? 

Dr. SLATER. NSEP’s data on completion of the service requirement is based on 

submission of an annual ‘‘Service Agreement Report’’ submitted by each award re-
118 

cipient. To date, approximately 2,550 NSEP award recipients have incurred a service requirement since 1996 (recipients in 1994 and 1995 did not incur a service requirement). Of these 2,550, approximately 300 are furthering their education and 

have been granted extensions. An additional 91 have either been granted a waiver, 

opted to repay the scholarship/fellowship, or have been forwarded to the United 

States Treasurer for collection. Of the remaining 2,150, many are still enrolled in 

degree programs and are not actually candidates to fulfill the requirement. 

Our current records indicate that approximately 1,350 award recipients have completed or are currently fulfilling their service requirements. Seventy-four percent 

(998) of these 1,350 are fulfilling the requirement in the Federal Government with 

the remainder in higher education (note that from 1996-2004, award recipients had 

the option of fulfilling the requirement in higher education). A number of our award 

recipients have served in more than one Federal position, with the result that 1,200 

Federal positions have been filled with NSEP alums. 

A total of 114 Flagship Fellows have been funded since 2004. Of these 114, 17 

are continuing their education and have received deferrals of their service requirement. Of the remaining 97, 40 have secured positions in the Federal sector. Many 

of the remaining 57 are just reaching the point of seeking Federal positions and we 

expect a very high percentage of them to be successful. 

The numbers and percentage of award recipients gaining Federal positions has increased steadily since 2001. New programs have been developed in Federal agencies 

to identify positions for NSEP award recipients. The State Department waives the 

written exam requirement in the Foreign Service for NSEP Graduate Fellows. 

NSEP does accept applications from ROTC students as well as students in the 

military Reserves. However, the National Security Education Act of 1991 includes 

a stipulation that there may not be, during the period of study under the award, 

any relationship between the award recipient and any Federal agency or organization involved in United States intelligence activities. Consequently, NSEP requires 

any award recipient who has such a relationship, to officially terminate the association for the period of the award. 

Dr. SNYDER. The service witnesses at the previous hearing and in our briefings 

related that the NSEP program doesn’t feed them graduates for civilian personnel. 

Does the NSEP staff try to work with the services’ manpower and human resources 

staffs to find placements? 

Dr. SLATER. Our NSEP service placement staff has met with representatives from 

the Services to identify possible placements. There have been a significant number 

of placements with the Services and at the Combatant Commands. This is clearly 

an area for expansion and improvement. 

Dr. SNYDER. Have any NSEP graduates or Flagship participants ever taught at 

DLI or any of other Defense school or program? Understanding that there was a 

contraction in the Russian Department there in the 90s, is there a demand now for 

newly-minted masters degrees or doctorates? (Dr. Givens mentioned they needed 

placements for Russian teachers among others.) 

Dr. SLATER. Upon occasion, an NSEP or Flagship graduate will work with DLI. 

However, DLI tends to hire only native speakers of the language as its instructors 

making most NSEP award recipients ineligible for instructor positions. It is likely 

that more NSEP and Flagship graduates would consider DLI if there were positions 

open to them. 

Dr. SNYDER. If you got more money, how would you spend it for NSEP? For NSLI? 

What existing programs would you enhance? What new initiatives would you start? 

Dr. SLATER. The Language Flagship is beginning to make a significant impact on 

language teaching in United States higher education. NSEP could diffuse innovation 

throughout a broader spectrum of universities across the U.S. In addition, while not 

proposing to address K-12 education in the United States—a more appropriate effort 

for the Department of Education—Flagship could expand its articulation efforts between higher education and high schools in the U.S. Certainly, an expansion of 

quality, proficiency-based high school language programs would not only enhance 

the Flagship effort to graduate professionally proficient university students, but it 

would also address the needs of the Services for recruits with language skills. 

NSEP could also expand its partnership with the States to expand the language 

roadmap effort. While it is imperative that the initiative for language roadmaps 

must come from each State, an expanded Federal-State partnership in this arena 

would provide additional incentives to organize and coordinate the process. 

NSEP’s English for Heritage Language Speakers (EHLS) program can also be expanded. At present, the program, designed and implemented at Georgetown University, can only accommodate up to 30 students a year. Only in its third year, 30 graduates have been placed in positions throughout the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, and the intelligence community. 
119 

EHLS graduates have played a pivotal role in helping the Central Intelligence 

Agency start up its Open Source Works organization, an operation designed to provide open source analysis. 

Dr. SNYDER. Do NLSC volunteers get any deployment preparation, training or 

equipment? What civilian and military reserve models were pursued for the NLSC 

program planning? Who will run the 24/7 ops center? Who will approve requests for 

support and how will requests be prioritized (p. 20 of written testimony)? Please explain the NLSC logo and tagline (p. 21 of written testimony). 

Dr. SLATER. NLSC members will receive extensive readiness training throughout 

their membership. Member readiness includes training necessary for NLSC members to be prepared for activation, deployment, and redeployment and to successfully 

perform as a member of a Government team. Examples of this training include personal preparations for activation, deployment, and redeployment, the culture of the 

organization being supported, the roles and functions of the NLSC and its members, 

and what it means to work as a member of a Government team. Specialized deployment training and equipment will be supplied by the gaining organization, if required, for specific deployments. 

The NLSC has examined and adapted concepts from several Reserve and volunteer service models, including the United States Military Reserve and National 

Guard, the Department of State’s Civilian Response Corps, AmeriCorps, Disaster 

Medical Assessment Teams, Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams, and 

the Office of the Civilian Volunteer Medical Reserve Corps in developing and improving the concept of operations for the NLSC. 

The NLSC staff will run the 24/7 operations center. The staff will have both Government and, where acceptable, contractor support employees. 

Requests for services will be processed in the order they are received unless national needs dictate a higher priority. Final priority assignment and approval rests 

with the Director of NLSC. 

The NLSC logo represents unity and diversity of people and language. It reflects 

that the NLSC members are a diverse group who cross cultural boundaries by 

speaking more than one language to work together towards a greater good for all. 

Each thread in the logo is part of a woven fabric without a finished edge, representing the fact that languages are not limited by manmade borders. The weave 

itself signifies that any individual or individual language can perform alone, but 

when working together, individuals become something far more versatile that protects and adds beauty to our world. Similarly, individual threads are stronger when 

woven together than each is separately. The NLSC logo symbolizes the best of 

human nature that we see exhibited when we pull together in times of crisis and 

emergency around the globe. 

Language for the good of all is the accompanying tagline that expresses how the 

NLSC, as a public program, adds meaning and purpose to one’s language skills and 

strengthens global unity. It builds upon the theme of service that was identified as 

a main motivator for individuals to join the NLSC during the branding study conducted as part of the feasibility assessments of the program. 

Dr. SNYDER. There have been proposals for stronger centralization and direction 

of the Federal government’s language program. Some would establish a council as 

well as a national language director in the Executive Office of the President. Would 

this be helpful? What drawbacks do you see? Why establish a ‘‘council’’ instead of 

something like the Office of Science and Technology Policy or a ‘‘czar’’? 

Dr. SLATER. The Department of Defense (DoD) has long favored an ongoing dialogue on the best approach to ensure coordination and direction of language programs across the Federal Government. The National Security Language Initiative 

represents an important step in this direction as it brings together senior representatives from the four participating organizations: DoD, State, Education, and Office 

of the Director of National Intelligence. The Department continues to look for opportunities to develop stronger coordination across agencies. 

Dr. SNYDER. How could the Dept of Education take over the Diffusion of Innovation role that DOD has taken to encourage, guide and support the state programs 

and flagships? Are there challenges beyond just the funding? 

Dr. SLATER. The Department of Education could adopt approaches within its own 

programs under Title VI of the Higher Education Act that would support and enhance the reach of Flagship. Additionally, it could adopt approaches within its own 

programs under Title VI of the Higher Education Act that would support high-quality undergraduate language instruction that follows the Flagship model. 

Dr. SNYDER. What federal funding has been authorized and obligated for the 5 

programs that fall under the Defense Department for NSEP? Is there any additional 

information you would like to add for the record? 
120 

Dr. SLATER. During Fiscal Year 2008, Congress authorized $44.7 million in support of the five major programs that currently fall under NSEP. These funds have 

been obligated as follows: 

1. NSEP Boren Undergraduate Scholarships: $ 2 million 

2. NSEP Boren Graduate Fellowships: $ 2 million 

3. English for Heritage Language Speakers $ 2 million 

4. National Language Service Corps $ 7.5 million 

5. Language Flagship $ 26 million 

The remaining funds have been obligated to support NSEP administrative and 

contract efforts, including staff salaries, office rent, and information technology support. 

Dr. SNYDER. Are Flagship graduates made aware of, and encouraged to volunteer 

for, the National Language Service Corps? 

Dr. SLATER. Yes. As we launch the NLSC recruiting effort, we are identifying as 

candidates all recipients of National Security Education Program (NSEP) awards, 

including Flagship graduates. NSEP is currently developing an algorithm that will 

provide these individuals with credit against their Federal service requirement both 

for joining the NLSC and, of course, for service that results from activation. 

Dr. SNYDER. The Department and others liken the shock of 9/11 to the shock over 

the launching of Sputnik and suggest that the nation needs to react with a similar 

commitment of resources and determination. Are the current efforts toward improving language instruction and cultural understanding on a similar scale? What kind 

of leadership at the national level would you like to see on this? 

Dr. SLATER. Significant progress has been made in advancing the effort to improve language instruction and cultural understanding across a broader cross-section of Americans. We still have a very long way to go particularly in building more 

effective programs during early childhood education. Some of this can be addressed 

through programs such as the Flagship program that supports advanced language 

learning for students of all undergraduate majors. This must be coupled with 

stronger and more effective national leadership that stresses the importance of welldeveloped and carefully articulated second language learning as integral to the entire educational process, along with the study of science and math. 

Dr. SNYDER. Have you taken or evaluated DLPT5 or DLI’s instructional methodology or curriculum? 

Dr. SLATER. The National Security Education Program (NSEP) is not directly involved in issues related to the DLPT5. A number of Flagship graduates have taken 

the DLPT5 and NSEP continues to work with DLI leadership to identify approaches 

that will facilitate our award recipients having the opportunity to be tested. 

NSEP has worked to build stronger collaboration with DLI in the instructional 

methodology and curricular development arena. In September 2008, NSEP, at the 

request of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Plans, sponsored a major 

meeting among representatives from DLI, the military academies, and key institutional project directors of Flagship centers. At this meeting, participants developed 

an initial agenda for areas of collaboration among these constituencies. 

Dr. SNYDER. It was not entirely clear in the hearing how languages are designated 

as ‘‘critical.’’ How does this process work? 

Dr. SLATER. The Department of Defense develops and maintains an annual list 

of ‘‘stronghold’’ and ‘‘investment’’ languages. The National Security Education Program relies on these lists to develop its focus for emphasis of languages in all of 

its programs. 

Dr. SNYDER. Is the American Council of Teaching Foreign Language’s test a ‘‘gold 

standard’’ for assessment? What important skills doesn’t it evaluate? 

Dr. SLATER. When people refer to the ACTFL assessment, they are almost exclusively referring to the Oral Proficiency Interview. It is the most widely used test 

in the public sector for the assessment of speaking proficiency. This test has been 

reviewed and revised to demonstrate assessment validity and reliability for 25+ 

years. ACTFL proficiency levels are referenced off of the Interagency Language 

Roundtable proficiency guidelines. ACTFL proficiency tests are currently being used 

worldwide by academic institutions, Government agencies, and private corporations 

for purposes such as: academic placement, student assessment, program evaluation, 

professional certification, hiring, and qualification for promotion. More than 12,000 

ACTFL tests are conducted yearly through the ACTFL Testing Program. Currently, 

ACTFL offers oral proficiency testing in more than 65 languages. The ACTFL Writing Proficiency Test is much less commonly used and only represents 12 languages. 

ACTFL does not offer assessments for reading and listening. 
121 

Dr. SNYDER. What is your Roadmap’s vision for teaching foreign language in other 

subject areas? Is there utility on combining content like language and science? 

Dr. SLATER. We strongly believe that the teaching of languages must be more 

fully integrated into the core curriculum for all students. Many students do not pursue language beyond elementary study because they do not see a link between their 

content studies and language learning. Through a number of initiatives in Flagship, 

we have promoted the concept that language curriculum is stronger if it is offered 

in content related courses throughout K-12 and higher education. All Flagship programs teach content courses in the target language. The Roadmap efforts have 

strongly supported the concept of ‘‘dual immersion,’’ which operationalizes the concept of teaching languages across the curriculum. Dual immersion programs very effectively draw on the richness of languages spoken by students in the system. 

Dr. SNYDER. How do the Roadmaps account for the transient nature much of the 

U.S. population—that students move from state to state? Should there be some national requirement or curriculum? 

Dr. SLATER. The Roadmap effort, as well as all programs supported under Flagship, emphasizes the importance of multiple entry points into language study. This 

is critical because expecting students to enter programs only at the beginning and 

to stay throughout limits access to high-quality language programs. We are working 

to help establish language learning models that are transferable from one school 

system to another throughout the entire educational process. 

For this reason, we emphasize a strong assessment based effort that will allow 

programs to assess the level of a student so that they can be appropriately placed 

in programs. We do not, however, believe that a single national curriculum would 

be effective. In addition we believe there should be a ‘‘selective’’ but not necessarily 

universal approach to language education—schools should be encouraged and 

incentivized but not required to offer languages as an integral component of the curriculum. 

Dr. SNYDER. Is there any additional information you would like to add for the 

record? 

Dr. SLATER. No, there is nothing further I would like to add. 

Dr. SNYDER. Are Flagships graduates made aware of, and encouraged to volunteer 

for, the National Language Service Corps? 

Dr. GIVENS. [HUF refers to the Hindi Urdu Flagship at The University of Texas 

at Austin; AF refers to the Arabic Flagship at The University of Texas at Austin.] 

• The HUF is only in the second year of operation and there are no graduates 

yet. 

• The NLSC would certainly be an option that the HUF presents to graduates. 

• The AF have 4 students doing their study year abroad year in Alexandria and 

were introduced to the NLSC during the orientation session they had in DC before departing for Egypt. 

• The AF plan to incorporate information about the NLSC on their web site and 

will inform current Arabic Flagship students of this opportunity. 

Dr. SNYDER. The Department and others liken the shock of 9/11 to the shock over 

the launching of Sputnik and suggest that the nation needs to react with similar 

commitment of resources and determination. Are the current efforts towards improving language instruction and cultural understanding on a similar scale? What 

kind of leadership at the national level would you like to see on this? 

Dr. GIVENS. 

• There is a need to establish a position at the highest level of government which 

will coordinate a federal campaign to improve language and international education. 

• This office will serve and represent all levels of education (from K-12 and higher 

education) and the Departments of Commerce, Defense and Education, Intelligence and Labor. 

• This office will also be responsible for creating national guidelines for assessments and curriculum implementation of language education and making sure 

that each state complies with the given guidelines. 

• Each state should be represented at this office as well to ensure that priority 

is given to language and international education based on the state’s requirements and needs. 

• There must be a federal initiative to fund and sustain these guidelines once 

they are created. 

Dr. SNYDER. Have you taken or evaluated DLPT5 or DLI’s instructional methodology or curriculum? 
122 

Dr. GIVENS. 

• The DLPT’s are not readily available outside the DLI but the HUF have discussed these examinations with DLI officials and teachers. 

• There was workshop in Austin in November 2007, where the HUF discussed 

and compared instructional methodology and curriculum with DLI and another 

workshop is being planned in Monterrey for the current academic year. 

Dr. SNYDER. It was not entirely clear in the hearing how languages are designated 

as ‘‘critical.’’ How does this process work? 

Dr. GIVENS. 

• The term ‘‘critical language’’ is usually defined by government institutions (Department of Defense) and is based on national needs and perhaps also the lack 

of availability of instruction in the language. 

• The term has acquired dimensions related to political and military conflict. 

Dr. SNYDER. Is the American Council of Teaching Foreign Language’s test a ‘‘gold 

standard’’ for assessment? What important skills doesn’t it evaluate? 

Dr. GIVENS. 

• There are no good reading and listening tests for Hindi and Urdu provided by 

ACTFL. 

• The HUF is obliged to devise their own assessment systems, building on the 

models of those available for other languages. 

• For the AF, the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) is the ‘‘gold standard’’ 

for assessing the speaking skill. 

• Beyond the OPI, however, the AF does not have adequate instruments to assess 

the other skills. 

• This will change soon as the Language Flagship is working with the National 

Middle East Language Resource Center (NMELRC) and ACTFL to develop a 

comprehensive proficiency test for reading and listening in Arabic which should 

be ready within a year. 

Dr. SNYDER. What is your Roadmap’s vision for teaching foreign language in other 

subject areas? Is there utility on combining content like language and science? 

Dr. GIVENS. 

• We firmly believe in the need to introduce learners to content courses in the 

various disciplines in which the medium of communication is the foreign language. For example: Spanish for the field of Social Work. 

• The Texas Roadmap advocates the dual immersion methods which have so far 

proven to be successful in teaching languages. 

Dr. SNYDER. How do the Roadmaps account for the transient nature much of the 

U.S. population—that students move from state to state? Should there be some national requirement or curriculum for foreign language? 

Dr. GIVENS. 

• There are certainly advantages to national requirements and curricula for foreign language, but it is probably not practical in the U.S. because of the decentralized nature of our educational system. 

• Given that educational requirements are determined by the various states, we 

may think of some national guidelines that would provide a general framework 

for curriculum development and assessment. 

• An example of such framework is the National Standards for Foreign Language 

developed by ACTFL. 

• The Standards provide curricular guidelines that can be implemented by schools 

nationwide. 

Dr. SNYDER. Is there any additional information that you would like to add to the 

record? 

Dr. GIVENS. 

• The HUF have been collaborating with the few existing programs, including the 

Hindi program at the Bellaire foreign language magnet program in the Houston 

Independent School District and the Hindi Program of the International Business Initiative of the Hurst-Euless-Bedford ISD in Tarrant County, Texas. 

• The HUF is also looking at ways of addressing the dearth of K-12 teaching in 

these languages, and in particular are developing teacher-training processes to 

deal with the demand which is likely to emerge when the momentum of the 

Language Flagship initiative begins to make itself felt more fully throughout 

the educational system. 
123 

• The AF have just begun their K-12 outreach program and plan to work closely 

with schools in the Austin, Houston and Dallas areas to provide support for any 

school interested in offering Arabic. 

• The AF will be working with the UTeach Program at The University of Texas 

at Austin to discuss certification for teachers planning careers in teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language. 

• The Texas Language Roadmap would like additional funding to help expand the 

language roadmap effort as the initiative must come from the state level. 

• This can continue our efforts to coordinate a high-level functioning board from 

all the various stakeholders from the business, education and government community that have a strong influence within their own communities. 

• Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students have increased by 42.2% between 

1996-97 and the 2006-2007 academic school years while the number of students 

in Bilingual or ESL programs grew by 51.6%, according to the Texas Education 

Agency (TEA). The NCLB mandate have motivated schools to be more aggressive in providing services to LEP students and thus the cost of education in the 

State of Texas have rose and is expected to rise dramatically. Texas provides 

monetary support for these students and is given priority over foreign languages. 

Dr. SNYDER. What is your opinion of the current state of machine translators? In 

what situations are they most useful? 

Dr. BOURGERIE. The use of electronic corpora has improved the accuracy of machine translation over the last few years. Research on the evaluation of machine 

translation conducted by MIT Lincoln Labs indicates that machine translation performs best when used for key-word spotting or translation of concrete factual communications. It does not work well when the context for the communication is not 

known, when the message is too short to establish a context, when the author of 

the communication is talking around the subject, when dealing with abstract subjects, or when it is necessary to identify inferences, sarcasm, or emotion within the 

communication. Given these limitations, academia, commerce, and government all 

use machine translation as part of the ‘‘triage’’ process of identifying which communications should have highest priority for human translation—but not for definitive 

translations of those communications. 

Dr. SNYDER. Are Flagship graduates made aware of and encouraged to volunteer 

for, the National Language Service Corps? 

Dr. BOURGERIE. At this point our Flagship graduates arc not generally aware of 

the National Language Service Corps program. As we get more information on the 

program in the coming year, we will feature it on our website and in promotional 

materials. I believe Flagship students will be ideal candidates for the program. I 

also think that many of our advanced students at BYU will be excellent candidates. 

We very much look forward to promoting this program. 

Dr. SNYDER. The Department and others liken the shock of 9/11 to the shock over 

the launching of Sputnik and suggest that the nations need to react with a similar 

commitment of resources and determination. Are the current efforts toward improving language instruction and cultural understanding on a similar scale? What kind 

of leadership at the national level would you like to see on this? 

Dr. BOURGERIE. I believe that 9/11 did reveal to the general public and to the government the extent to which we were unprepared to interact in other languages and 

cultures. Though we are fortunate to have in this country a significant number of 

heritage speakers, we have learned that relying on heritage speakers alone is nowhere near sufficient to meet national capacity needs, whether in government, industry, or business. Many of the recent federal and state efforts have begun to address the need, but much more needs to be done at the basic level—particularly in 

the K-12 arena. It will take time no matter what we do but there are things that 

we can do now. Though I do not think a mandatory national language curriculum 

is warranted, I believe that national leadership needs to help set standards and provide guidance for state and local leaders. What we have seen in Utah is an strong 

desire to partner with Universities, national organizations, and federal efforts like 

the Flagship program. They know their context well, but are looking to the kind of 

guidance that high education can give with respect to best practices, materials, and 

methods. 

Dr. SNYDER. Have you taken or evaluated DLPT5 or DLI’s instructional methodology or curriculum? Is there any additional information you would like to add for 

the record? 

Dr. BOURGERIE. I have visited DLI on several occasions. Recently, I also attended 

a meeting in Austin, Texas intended to increase greater cooperation between Flagship programs and the DoD, including DLI and military academies. DLI’s resources 
124 

are incomparable and its role in the language teaching world is unique. The number 

of students taught there is also well beyond any other institutions in the US and 

as such it is potentially a superb laboratory for language teaching. 

I am somewhat familiar with the DLPT5 but have neither taken it nor evaluated 

it formally. The current tests are apparently well designed, but they are still wrestling with the challenge of setting accurate ‘‘cut scores’’ when assigning proficiency 

levels. This is especially true for tests of the ‘‘receptive’’ skills of reading and listening. 

We have had a number of graduates take the DLPT5 in Chinese and have had 

doubts about its validity. That is, the assignment to levels has not correlated well 

with other proficiency assessments and other achievement evidence—trending high 

in some cases and low in other times. Moreover, access to the test outside of DLI 

and the military is severely limited, and we have not had enough experience at our 

center to be definitive about the DLPT5’s appropriateness. 

In observing DLI use of the DLPT5, what is clear is that the test takes far too 

prominent a role in the pedagogy of the Institute. A fundamental assumption of any 

proficiency test is that it should be independent of curriculum, so that one can see 

how graduates or participants of a given program compare objectively to others. The 

emphasis of a proficiency exam should be on what the person can do rather than 

how well a student has mastered a particular lesson. However, the DLPT5 seems 

to pervade every aspect of the Institute. This overemphasis on testing in a shortterm program distorts the teaching and is at odds with the fundamentals of as proficiency measures. Incentives lead students and teachers to focus too heavily on the 

test as opposed to general achievement. DLI may want reconsider using other established measures along with the DLPT5, which could in turn assess a wider range 

of abilities based on needs analysis of potential job assignments. 

Dr. SNYDER. It was not entirely clear in the hearing how languages are designated 

as ‘‘critical.’’ How does this process work? 

Dr. BOURGERIE. The label ‘‘critical language’’ is currently at best ambiguous and 

at worst confusing. The label should be disambiguated by specifying ‘‘for whom’’ this 

is a ‘‘critical’’ need and ‘‘why.’’ Some languages may be in the ‘‘critical’’ need category 

for both national security and commercial reasons. Others may only be important 

for one or the other reason. Still others may only be important for anthropological 

research or for linguists documenting the evolution of human languages. 

Whether or not there is an official list of critical languages is also unclear. The 

Department of Defense apparently has a process within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Preparedness, but the process is not a public one nor is the 

list published as far as I know. Indirectly, we take the languages emphasized by 

the National Security Education Program to be critical need languages (Arabic, Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Korean, Persian, Russian, and West African). DoD has two related classifications: Immediate Investment Languages and Stronghold Languages. 

Immediate Investment Languages refers to languages toward which DoD has committed resources over the next ten years for in-house capability. Stronghold Languages are those in which DoD wants to maintain on-call capability. 

Exactly what constitutes a ‘‘Critical Language’’ or ‘‘Critical-need Language’’ is not 

clear to most people in the academic world either. The term itself is used loosely 

in language teaching circles, often interchangeable with the term Less-Commonly 

Taught Languages (LCTL). In the higher education world there are funded programs such as the University of Arizona’s Critical Language Program (funded in 

part by a US Department of Education IRS grant), which focuses on Cantonese, Chinese, Kazakh, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, and Ukrainian. A list recently 

circulated by the State Department lists some 78 languages, based on political importance and intent to preserve heritage languages or endangered languages. 

Dr. SNYDER. Is the American Council of Teaching Foreign Language’s test a gold 

standard for assessment? What important skills doesn’t it evaluate? 

Dr. BOURGERIE. The ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) is the most widely 

recognized test in US, especially in the higher education world. The ACTFL battery 

includes a writing test as well, but it is not nearly as widely used as the OPI. In 

addition, many other assessments are referenced to the ACTFL-OPI as well. 

One of the important benefits of the OPI is its wide use and availability. It can 

be done in person or by phone. However, because of its relatively high cost (per student $134 for OPI, and $65 for the writing tests of September 2008), it is not viable 

for broad based testing in most academic programs and therefore is somewhat 

under-utilized. The BYU Flagship Center is currently doing research on correlations 

between the ACTFL-OPI, DLPT, and HSK (the China-wide national test for foreigners) to provide a better sense of how these various measures relate to one another. 
125 

The ACTFL tests do not assess reading, or listening comprehension specifically. 

There are two ACTFL rated (but not ACTFL certified) computer-adaptive tests that 

address listing and reading in Chinese and that the have potential to help to fill 

the gap in skills assessment: The CCALT (Chinese Computerized Adaptive Listening Comprehension Test) and CATRC (Computer-Adaptive Test for Reading Chinese). The former is a University of Hawaii test (by Ted Yao) now being recalibrated 

by Brigham Young University; the latter test (by Ke Chuanren) is distributed by 

the Ohio State University. 

Dr. SNYDER. What is your Roadmap’s vision for teaching foreign language in other 

subject areas? Is there utility in combining content like language and science? 

Dr. BOURGERIE. The development process around a Utah Language Road Map is 

markedly different than the previous three (Ohio, Oregon, and Texas) as was the 

Summit process that launched it. The summit was largely initiated by the Governor’s office, though the BYU Flagship Center and NSEP were partners. The state 

had already proactively begun to form a policy on language training and to allocate 

recourses for languages (specifically though two state bills 80 and 41). 

The roadmap is now being drafted following the September 16th Governor’s Language Summit. Following the Summit, Governor Huntsman initiated a standing language advisory council, which will meet for the first time on December 11th. This 

advisory council is also responsible for drafting the roadmap, which is scheduled to 

be delivered at the Utah International Education Summit on January 14th, 2009. 

The extent to which content-based instruction is feasible in foreign language curriculum is under discussion as well. The state has already made commitment to K6 immersion programs in a number of languages, including Chinese (10), French (4), 

Spanish (9) and Navajo (1). These dual language immersion programs are inherently content based, in which certain subjects will be in target language and others 

in the base language. 

Dr. SNYDER. How do the Roadmaps account for the transient nature of much of 

the U.S. population—that students move from state to state? Should there be some 

national requirement or curriculum? 

Dr. BOURGERIE. The strategy on articulation with other state programs is part of 

the ongoing discussion in drafting the Utah Roadmap document. The discussion has 

centered on making sure that state schools are knowledgeable of national language 

standards, though not necessarily bound by them. Within the state Chinese language programs, for example, various types of programs are articulated to each 

other and students are tested to make sure they are meeting similar target proficiency standards. While we do not believe that a national curriculum, per se, is 

a desirable goal at this time, we feel strongly that there needs to be much better 

communication and greater interchange between language educators and administrators regionally and nationally. To the extent that best practices can be implemented according to local conditions, articulation will become easier. 

Dr. SNYDER. Is there any additional information you would like to add for the 

record? 

Dr. BOURGERIE. I believe there is a clear need for a multi-faceted, national language strategy that addresses needs in the short, medium, and long-term. Like any 

skill language learning requires a minimum amount of time on task. Better methods 

and conditions can shorten the time to mastery, but cannot short cut fundamental 

training. No amount of money can get a beginning pianist to play a challenging concerto in weeks or even months, but an excellent teacher and quality practice time 

will make the process move much more quickly than if those conditions are not 

present. Likewise, in language learning we need the best possible methods, teachers, and materials to devote to training. But we also need time. 

The existing skills of heritage speakers and other natural populations of language 

learners can be built upon now. We have shown in Flagship that we can train talented and motivated students to the highest levels of language proficency (DLPT 3+ 

and 4) in a university context through domestic and overseas training, even in noncognate languages. However, we will never completely meet our needs if students 

generally do not begin serious language study until college. Significant efforts need 

to be taken to ensure larger numbers of American students have access to quality 

language training beginning in grade school. This challenge is formidable, but 

achievable and can be met through Federal, State, and local cooperation. I believe 

that the American people and the educational system are now ready to meet that 

challenge. 

Dr. SNYDER. Are Flagship graduates made aware of, and encouraged to volunteer 

for, the National Language Service Corps? 

Dr. WALKER. I have not received any reports from graduates that they have been 

informed of the National Language Service Corps. My program has not received any 
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information about this organization. I assume that NSEP will enroll all those who 

successfully complete the Flagship programs. 

Dr. SNYDER. The Department and others liken the shock of 9/11 to the shock over 

the launching of Sputnik and suggest that the nation needs to react with a similar 

commitment of resources and determination. Are the current efforts toward improving language instruction and cultural understanding on a similar scale? What kind 

of leadership at the national level would you like to see on this? 

Dr. WALKER. The national goal should be to provide large numbers of Americans 

opportunities to learn to function in foreign languages and cultures. Given this goal, 

our efforts fall far short of accomplishing anything significant. 

Our country should establish a national language policy that would address the 

major issues confronting the effort to globalize American education by making foreign language proficiency a commonly achieved result. Such a policy should be developed by a well-budgeted office that is capable of prioritizing languages (i.e., 

rationalizing the critical languages list), setting performance standards for those 

languages, creating national teacher certification standards, and establishing commonly recognized assessment procedures. I think language educators across the 

country are ready to respond to clear, strategic leadership in this area. 

I would suggest that the person leading such an office be chosen for strategic and 

political reasons. He/she should not be from the fields of language education, although knowledge of those fields would be desirable. 

Dr. SNYDER. Have you taken or evaluated DLPT5 or DLI’s instructional methodology or curriculum? 

Dr. WALKER. As a member of DLI’s Board of Visitors, I have had a good look at 

the DLPT5 and engaged the developers of these tests in intense discussions. The 

DLPT5 tests are well made and verified by extensive research. There are some basic 

questions about the design of the tests. For example, I am still puzzled about the 

bilingual formats at all levels; however, the implementation of the chosen design is 

quite good. 

My concern is that the DLPT5 is essentially the organizing principle of DLI, with 

students, teachers, and administrators nearly obsessed with the students’ performances on these tests. Instruction is continually referenced to these tests and students are essentially trained to take these tests. In a fundamental way, this situation negates the ‘‘proficiency’’ aspect of the tests, since proficiency has usually referred to testing independent of any curriculum. 

The next step for the DLPT5 is to correlate scores with job performance and other 

standardized tests. If the DLPT5 can be shown to be an indicator of job performance, then its role in the overall DLI instructional practice would be more rational. 

Without a demonstrable connection between the DLPT5 and the ultimate purpose 

of the training, the grip the DLPT5 has on the work of the institution should be 

loosened. 

Without the tyranny of the DLPT5, the DLI might use a broader array of assessments that could be related more closely to the desired job performances and the 

instruction could become more responsive to the requirements of end users. 

Dr. SNYDER. It was not entirely clear in the hearing how languages are designated 

as ‘‘critical.’’ How does this process work? 

Dr. WALKER. I have been perplexed by this question throughout my career. The 

latest Proposed Critical language List from the US/ED contains 78 critical languages that seem to reflect numbers of speakers and political importance. This list 

is circulated among language scholars for comment, so I suppose the ultimate result 

is a consensus among concerned language professionals. 

Dr. SNYDER. Is the American Council of Teaching Foreign Language’s test a ‘‘gold 

standard’’ for assessment? What important skills doesn’t it evaluate? 

Dr. WALKER. The ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) is the most widely recognized assessment in foreign language study. The ACTFL writing test is much less 

utilized. 

Our Chinese Flagship Program is focused on placing our students in Chinese 

workplaces and preparing them linguistically and culturally to thrive in those environments. This requires cultural knowledge and a command of the formalities of 

interactions in the work environment. The ACTFL OPI is not a good indicator of 

success in these situations. One reason is that the OPI for Chinese was largely 

based on the OPI for European languages. Another reason is that the interview format of the OPI is not something that commonly occurs in the cultural contexts of 

a Chinese workplace. For example, a foreign speaker of Chinese will be interviewed 

about an area of that person’s special knowledge. There would rarely be an interview in which the intention is to find out how much Chinese the person really 

knows, but it would be relatively common to be interviewed about an academic discipline or an occupational area. Conversations, presentations, note taking . . . these 
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are the skills that are more likely to determine success in a cooperative work environment and they are not revealed in the typical OPI. 

The internship, or work experience in a Chinese environment, is a key step toward advanced skills. Success in this environment is one of the strongest indicators 

that our students will test at the higher proficiency levels. 

We conclude the ACTFL OPI is not a good indicator of success in the Chinese 

workplace, but success in the Chinese workplace is a good indicator of success on 

the ACTFL OPI. 

Dr. SNYDER. What is your Roadmap’s vision for teaching foreign language in other 

subject areas? Is there utility in combining content like language and science? 

Dr. WALKER. The Ohio Roadmap reflects the ideas of persons from the business 

and government sectors. One of their strongest recommendations was that language 

and culture knowledge be combined with technical and academic discipline knowledge. In other words, as you learn a language, learn to do something useful in that 

language. 

As we have worked on designing a K-12 Chinese language curriculum, we have 

come to the conclusion that after the basic language skills are developed (say, after 

4-5 years of one-hour-per-day elementary school coursework), we should focus our 

language lessons on topics in mathematics and the natural sciences. There are basic 

reasons for this strategy: 1) The Chinese number system is more transparent than 

the English number system and can be learned relatively early while strengthening 

the students numeracy, 2) Nearly all Chinese scientific terminology is transparent, 

meaning that a term is a description of the phenomenon it represents. Thus, learning Chinese terminology solidifies the students’ grasp of scientific concepts as they 

expand their vocabulary. 3) Early teens are less inclined to be accepting and concerned about different cultures and relative perceptions of the world. They are primarily focused on peers, even to the exclusion of parents and family. Scientific topics avoid the need to adapt to other cultural norms and present a relatively stable 

area of classroom activity. 4) If US students learn to deal with natural science subjects, they will be able to interact with Chinese students on projects. As we connect 

classrooms by videoconference across Pacific, the ability to meaningfully communicate with young people in China could become a significant motivator for continuing Chinese language study. 

For the above reasons, as Ohio increases the number STEM (Science, Technology, 

Engineering, Mathematics) schools, we are working with these schools to include 

Chinese language study as a mainstay of their curriculums. 

Dr. SNYDER. How do the Roadmaps account for the transient nature of the U.S. 

population—that students move from state to state? Should there be some national 

requirement or curriculum? 

Dr. WALKER. Some form of a national curriculum should be developed, presumably 

by a national office that sets national performance standards. With a commonly pursued curriculum, students can continue their progress in a language when they depart from a program in one school to that of another school. A national curriculum 

would also make teacher training more effective and encourage the continual enrichment of the common curriculum by materials developers. 

The Ohio Roadmap teams emphasized extended sequences of language instruction 

that have multiple points of access. This is necessary to avoid the constant attrition 

of language programs caused by the transiency of student populations. Our solution 

for the K-12 programs is to posit a three-phase curriculum design that functions 

analogous to other skill-based curricula such as music or martial arts. There are levels of performance that have to be progressed through to reach sequential higher 

levels of skills and knowledge. For example, if a student wants to become proficient 

in the violin, he/she must start at beginning orchestra and then progress to intermediate and on to advanced orchestra. This is the case no matter how old the student is or what grade she/he is enrolled in. While this presents scheduling challenges for schools, it does permit students to progress through language curricula 

at a variable pace that reflects their talents and efforts. It also emphasizes the goals 

of student performance for a language-learning career. 

In addition to a performance-based curriculum, the Ohio Roadmap recommends 

the employment of distance-education technology to provide access to language programs to students in areas of Ohio where the languages are not offered. If a student 

leaves a Chinese language program at one school, he/she should be able to enroll 

in a statewide program to continue in the language if the language is not available 

at the new school. 

Dr. SNYDER. Is there any additional information you would like to add for the 

record? 

Dr. WALKER. The DLI is a national treasure. As it refines the implementation of 

its mission statement, especially as it develops language instruction that empha-
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sizes culturally appropriate contexts; it can have a major positive impact on language instruction across our Nation. It is the closest thing we have to a national 

language college and we need to make sure it rises to fulfill that role in both pedagogy and research. 

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