April 08, 2007

National Academy of Sciences report on "International Education and Foreign Languages"

This report was produced in response to a congressional mandate to review the Title VI and Fulbright-Hays programs. I'll have more to say about it later. For now, if you want to look the report over for yourself, they charge $36 to download the .pdf, but you can read the it online(a page at a time) for free here. And there's a webcast discussion here.

There's a significant political aspect, discussed from various perspectives here, here and here.

I'm more interested in the language-teaching aspects. For some background on how similar problems were addressed in a very different time, see these recent LL posts: "A tale of two societies" (3/1/2007), "Linguistics in 1940" (3/11/2007), "The Intensive Language Program" (3/20/2007), 'The Chinese Episode" (3/21/2007), "The Burmese Story" (3/22/2007).

Posted by Mark Liberman at April 8, 2007 07:27 AM