Guest Author: Title VI Funding for Area Students by anonymous-sarah

A recent Inside Higher Ed article by Elizabeth Redden addressed the 2011 47% budget cut to the Title VI National Resource Centers. These 125 Area Studies centers at public and private universities function to develop language facility and cultural awareness for the critical languages identified by the US Departments of Defense, Agriculture, Energy, and Commerce.  The concerns expressed in the article and at the conference dealt with the incongruity between the stated need to broaden the talent pool of those with advanced capacity in the critical languages and the deep cut in Title VI funding.

But if Title VI funding were fully restored to pre-2011 levels, would the impact on the number of college graduates with critical language proficiency be significant? The National Resources Centers are run by faculty, and serve the individual research interests of faculty by supplementing salaries and funding research travel. Depending on the preferences of the faculty and of those administering grants and salary supplementations, the outcomes may be more or less aligned with the objectives of the Title VI program. The conversation around the restoration of this funding should not be had without a strong proposal for making it more effective at achieving broader proficiency in the critical languages.

In addition to funding faculty positions and research, the National Resource Centers house small libraries; fund symposia, lectures, and film series; and engage in outreach efforts to K-12 educators. Language instruction is part of the equation, but there is at least as much emphasis on efforts to foster cultural understanding.

The promotion of culture studies is a laudable aim, though general cultural knowledge is a poor substitute for the ability to function in another language well enough to engage with a culture on its own terms. Culture studies filtered through one’s native language can be enjoyable, but is a bit like gazing at one’s fellow human beings through Hello Kitty colored goggles:  lots of goodwill comes through, but not enough authenticity. If we are serious about using Title VI for its intended purpose (and I believe we should be), the focus should be heavily on the learning of the 13 critical languages.

The way we approach language learning in the United States is largely a function of our geography, which is to say that with English as our unofficial official language, we have Mexican Spanish speakers bordering us to the south, and a low concentration of Canadian English speakers and the Québécois to our north. The personal need for most Americans to master a second language is not urgent. In our education system, we do a lot of second language teaching, but not much of it very effectively.  Furthermore, the ROI for the individual engaged in 2^nd language learning is in fact, not great:  A recent study at MIT showed evidence of only a 2-3% salary lift for college graduates with proficiency in a 2^nd language other than English. 

And for all of the hours of language instruction spent in Middle Schools and High Schools, few students arrive at four year colleges with enough proficiency to test into the second year of coursework. While working in an East Asian Area Studies Department at a large state university in the Midwest, I observed that incoming freshmen with four years of high school level Mandarin Chinese might rarely test into the second semester of Chinese I, but usually placed into the introductory level class.

Where critical languages are concerned, the acquisition runway is a long one. These are languages with few to no cognates or near cognates to English, and many do not use the Roman alphabet (or any alphabet, in the case of Chinese).  The approach we take to extending the runway to the K-12 set in the critical languages should be different to the approach we currently use to teach Spanish, French, etc. It must begin early enough to take advantage of the critical period for second language acquisition between birth and age 12.

Second language acquisition is mostly drudgery, and it is especially so for adult learners (ages 17+). To have any success with it, you have to want it. Bad. Bad enough to do the daily drill of vocabulary memorization, endure the hours of discomfort trying to grasp at anything in the auditory environment that will mean something to your ears, and if you are lucky enough to spend time in the country where your target language is spoken, you have to chance doing things like ordering a mushroom smoothie when you really meant banana. You have to be both disciplined and a risk taker. And you have to find as many moments of joy in this pursuit as you can until one day your facility becomes pleasurable. If you can make it that far, you are hooked. Our chances at bringing more young people to this point improve if we get to them while they are young.

Historically, Title VI has worked through the National Resource centers to extend the runway for critical languages through outreach efforts to K-12 teachers. Teacher outreach programs include everything from language training to cultural immersion opportunities abroad. Having been a K-12 teacher in a former life, I’m supportive of programs that broaden the experiences and knowledge for this group, and having worked as an Area Studies Grants Assistant, got to see the results in action. These outreach efforts are well-intentioned, but diffuse, as they must do their work through the filter of a teacher picking up a few professional development units on summer break.

What if we restored Title VI funding such that we extended the language acquisition runway in a direct, meaningful way to grade school children? If only someone were already running a low-cost model language instruction operation on college campuses for K-12 students in the United States, then we wouldn’t have to think too hard about how to do this. Wait! Someone is: The People’s Republic of China.

Every Saturday during the academic year, enough children to fill four floors of a large classroom building attend Mandarin language classes on the ASU campus. This operation is run by the Arizona Confucius Institute, which like all other Confucius Institutes, is a non-profit organization affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education and aimed at promoting Chinese language learning and culture worldwide. The classes are cheap (about $7 for 1.5 hours of instruction), and the pedagogy is very Chinese (lots of flash cards and 4 year-olds sitting at desks with pencil to paper for 90 minutes), but most importantly, this classroom building becomes the target language environment every Saturday (no 14 hour flight necessary!). All language instruction is strictly in Mandarin, and so is most of the socializing. Parent volunteers handle most of the administrative tasks, and native speakers from the University community and beyond are recruited to do the teaching.

The Confucius Institute model could be adapted to address language learning for all 13 of the most critical languages. Operating weekend and summer language institutes for K-12 students under a single umbrella at universities would be cost effective and a good use of Title VI outreach dollars. This approach could serve to complement to the government’s summer Startalk programs and promote learning of these languages year round.

If we were to fully restore Title VI and implemented this more direct approach of reaching young students, we could do at least as well as the Chinese Ministry of Education at language education for children in the United States.

anonymous-sarah works at the same Phoenix area for-profit higher education institution as anonymousbjorn.