Coming soon: the language czar

It's no great secret that since September 11th, 2001, foreign language skills have been a concern at the Pentagon in a way that they were not previously. But now, courtesy of Government Executive magazine, we learn that they've come up with a solution to the problem: create a bureaucracy for it.

In 2004, the DoD held a conference at the University of Maryland to discuss the shortage of qualified translators in strategically important languages, which resulted in the commissioning of that most useful of products, a white paper. Quoth the article:

"This task requires guidance and incentives from the federal level," the report said. "It is urgently recommended that a national language authority be appointed by the president to serve as the principal adviser, advocate and coordinator in the federal government, and to collaborate with state and local governments, academia and the private sector for improving our national foreign language and cultural understanding capabilities."

OK, so the paper doesn't actually say the word "czar" anywhere (and czars being the equals of kaisers and kings, how come we never talk about having a "drug kaiser" or "terror king"? [or queen -- ed.]). But the idea is the same; a new federal official, albeit probably not Cabinet-level, will end up overseeing a centrally coordinated effort to standardize langauge teaching. Assuming it doesn't end up being just one more piece of hot air from a Washington committee, the paper proposes to establish a "National Foreign Language Coordination Council" with responsibilities to include:

• Develop and coordinate a process for identifying, assessing, and distributing a comprehensive list of needs from all sectors for foreign language ability and cultural understanding
• Engage in regular consultation with language professionals from all sectors and with leaders in the Nation’s heritage communities regarding needed action
• Design and oversee – with appropriate government and private sector support – a system that ensures coordinated foreign language and regional studies programs in K-12 and postsecondary training in order to raise the level of understanding of all students and produce highly skilled language professionals
• Develop and oversee the implementation of foreign language and English language skill-level certification standards, teacher certifications, and graduation criteria for foreign language majors and for the language component of non-language majors (e.g., international business, national security studies, public administration, and health care)
• Advocate funding for applied foreign language research into issues of national concern and provide channels for dissemination of research results

There are more, but your host has selected these to demonstrate the broad scope of the proposed mandate for this bureaucracy. If enacted -- and with all sorts of Pearl Harbor-style comparisons to Sputnik, this is as excited as government bureaucrats get -- this will completely change how languages are taught and how funding priorities are ordered in language-related work in the United States.

So are linguists in on the conversation? Judging by the roll of speakers, apparently not. Right now, it's all university and high school administrators, people named "Ambassador", "Undersecretary" or "General", and business executives. A couple of participants were involved with applied linguistics departments, but other than that, linguists are not involved in this emerging community.

The question that remains is: should they be? The answer isn't so much "yes" as "where to start?". Linguists have been lamenting for years about the results of the field being marginalized within language pedagogy; this is an opportunity to develop a coherent response and change that. A new emphasis on becoming culturally literate, and not just grammatically competent, ought to mean that people with fieldwork experience are involved to make sure this is done well. From the computational side, this is a chance to broaden DoD and Intelligence Community affiliations beyond DARPA and ARDA, by getting things like multilingual information retrieval and question-answering in front of teachers and policy makers rather than TREC scoring committees. Philip Resnik has raised this issue before, albeit not specifically in response to the National Language Conference, and his questions bear repeating:

The question is, will linguistic theory rise to the occasion? Theoretical questions do not have to be explored without reference to how they might be applied. As the post-Sputnik tide rose, it lifted theory along with engineering in research, in education, and in the national mindset. Why should linguistic theoreticians not benefit in a similar way?

What is it going to take for linguists to get involved in setting language policy in the United States?

Comments

[Jim]

how come we never talk about having a "drug kaiser" or "terror king"? [or queen -- ed.]).

Well,we certainly had a Crime Queen for years and years.