A rapidly changing world order has prompted renewed interest in providing a national capacity for dealing with languages and cultures beyond those of Western Europe. In particular, much recent attention has been directed toward strengthening instruction in the less commonly taught languages. The authors suggest that past approaches to providing this capacity have been of only limited success and that a national less commonly taught language strategic planning process should be initiated, aimed at creating a new architecture for managing the delivery of instruction in these languages.
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References
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1. See, for example, Richard D. Brecht and A. Ronald Walton, The Case for a Framework for Learner-Managed Foreign Language Learning, NFLC Occasional Papers (Washington, DC: National Foreign Language Center, forthcoming).
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2. The National Endowment for the Humanities has selected one infrastructure component, teacher training, for attention in a select number of LCTLs, but without a powerful expertise base in the superstructure, it is not clear who should be teaching the teachers or what they should be teaching them.
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3. A possible exception to this generalization may be the National Security Education Program, which emphasizes, in addition to undergraduate study abroad and graduate student fellowships, national capacity building through the program-development portion of the initiative.
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4. In fact, much work is being done on the generic and language-specific language-learning frameworks by the National Council of Organizations of Less Commonly Taught Languages, within a project funded by the Ford Foundation. Cf. Brecht and Walton, Case for a Framework.
