I briefly touched on the National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) in a previous post but wanted to come back to discuss the program with this post. While cultural and educational exchanges have been a part of the U.S. secondary school landscape for decades the NSLI-Y, which was started in January 2006 as part of the larger National Security Language Initiative, not only provides an opportunity to infuse mutual understanding and foreign language competency into internationally engage secondary students but it is also a way for the U.S. Government to begin the recruitment process for internationally competent and fluent employees who understand and speak such critical languages as Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Hindi, Korean, Russian and Turkish and understand the people and cultures of these languages (see my previous post on this).
Those of you who are interested in learning more about the NSLI might find the following report Enhancing Foreign Language Proficiency in the United States: Preliminary Results of the National Security Language Initiative (2008) by the U.S. Department of Education to be of interest.
