Purpose of the Study

This report is not designed to provide a general evaluation of all Title VI/F-H programs. Rather, the intent here is to lay the foundation of such assessments in the future and to model the application of the GPRA to federal programs that are involved with education and research in general. This will be accomplished by demonstrating just how the EELIAS (Evaluation of Exchange, Language, and International Area Studies) system, developed in 1997, can be used to this end. Therefore, this report comprises the following:

There is a critical national requirement for skilled speakers of languages other than English. The need is not new. It has been recognized and documented for more than fifty years in reports of high-level commissions, published analytical studies, and testimony by government and private figures before both houses of Congress, reports in national and local news media, and in a major presidential initiative.

This is a companion to the white paper The Teachers We Need: Transforming World Language Education in the United States. The guide includes resources to support educators in implementing effective world language education and transforming the world language teacher supply system to meet twenty-first century needs.

This article examines high school graduation policies in all fifty states and the District of Columbia in order to assess the status of world language study in K–12 education. The article concludes that world language education is not prioritized in state-level policies, and it recommends initiatives at the federal level to improve the state of world language education in the United States.

A current project investigates the language activities of heritage language learners, as distinct from second language learners, who participate in STARTALK summer learning experiences. The project addresses commonalities and differences across these groups as they relate to their study of their language and their use of world languages beyond their STARTALK experience.

Data come from a 2014 survey of U.S. employers in the government, for-profit, and not-for-profit sectors, in 49 states and DC.
Some of these results are reported in: “The demand for multilingual human capital in the U.S. labor market,” by Damari, Rivers, Brecht, Gardner, Pulupa, and Robinson (2017), published in Foreign Language Annals.

This article presents the findings of a 2014 survey of US employers on their requirements for multilingual employees. It identifies the employment sectors that were most likely to value multilingual workers, and it describes which skill sets were most coveted in conjunction with foreign language ability. The study also explains that even though a vast majority of employers wanted employees who can communicate effectively with people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, only 10 percent of responding employers reported requiring foreign-language skills in hiring.

This paper compares the attitudes of heritage language learners and second language learners regarding language learning. One finding discussed in the paper is that heritage learners were less motivated than second language learners to study languages, and they were less likely to think that learning a language would yield personal or professional benefits.