San Jose Mercury News, CA - May 3, 2005
Feds mull national Chinese-language program
By Dana Hull
Mercury News
The federal government, alarmed by the lack of expertise in languages considered critical to national security, announced today that it wants to establish a comprehensive Chinese language instruction program for students in kindergarten through college.
The Chinese K-16 Flagship project will create a sequential course of instruction with the goal of graduating students who are linguistically and culturally fluent in Chinese. The request for proposals has attracted enormous interest from Bay Area educators and institutions who are anxious to see the program housed in northern California.
Universities are likely to partner with schools that serve elementary, middle- and high-school students as they collaboratively bid on the proposal, which currently dedicates $750,000 for the first year. But because the Bay Area already has a number of intensive Chinese-language programs in place, some hope the region will have an edge against competitors from elsewhere around the country.
``We are very excited that the federal government has finally recognized the importance of Chinese as an area of study and of beginning to learn the language while you are young,'' said Andrew Corcoran, head of the Chinese American International School in San Francisco. CAIS, which serves students from preK-8th grade, is the oldest Mandarin immersion program in the
country. ``There's a lot of opportunity here. I hope the decision makers look West.''
The new program is part of the ``National Flagship Language Initiative' which urges advanced skills in languages deemed critical to U.S. national security. A number of Arabic, Mandarin, Korean and Russian programsalready exist, but security experts now realize that multi-language literacy is best achieved when instruction starts in the early grades.
``This is the first time that anyone, not just the Department of Defense, has addressed the issue of a fully articulated program in a critical language like Chinese,'' said Bob Slater at the National Defense University, who is overseeing the proposal. ``Too often the programs are not designed for all years, or the handoff from elementary to middle school is not based on the same standards. This design is K-16, so you are basically at fourth level Chinese by the time you even get to college.''
The request for proposals will be available Wednesday online at www.nflc.org/nfli. Proposals are due by July 8 and will be reviewed by an independent merit review panel. Only one grant will be awarded, and that announcement should come in early September.
Contact Dana Hull at [log in to unmask] or (408) 920-2706.
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