Wednesday, January 28, 2009

National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y)

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.

4 comments:

  1. Do you know anything about President Obama's plan for this initiative?

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  2. @Anonymous ~ Many thanks for your question. I'm not aware of President Obama's plan for this initiative. While President Obama supports international academic and cultural exchanges he has yet to fully describe his international education policy. President Clinton did this towards the end of his administion in 2000 (see my related post on this at http://ihec-djc.blogspot.com/2009/08/dear-president-obama-whats-your.html) but President Bush did not. President Obama has had much on his plate since taking office so it is understandable that he hasn't issued any formal international educaiton plans including his plan for the NSLI-Y program.

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  3. is this program highly competitive?

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  4. @nutty professor, thanks for your question. I don't know how competitive this competition is and I don't know know where/if stats on the number of applicants and recipients are available.

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