Forming a Year of Languages Infrastructure
Under the auspices of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and the United States Department of Education in collaboration with the United States Congress, a national council will be formed that will help direct programs at a national level for the Year of Languages. The national council will have an honorary chair and approximately twenty-five honorary members. A small staff that will be housed at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages will support the council.
The honorary council chair will be a person of high visibility and immediate recognition within the United States. This individual will be a person who in his/her day-to-day work will foster international and linguistic collaboration.
Members of the honorary committee will include a balance of leaders of business and industry; members of the education community from pre-kindergarten to post-secondary university and college levels; members of the proprietary language communities whose schools and institutions that have at their core teaching foreign language for business, practices and international careers and public policy makers from the state and federal levels such as members of the National Association of State Boards of Education and the Chief State School Officers.
The committee will also include members of Congress, of the Department of State, the Department of Education, the media, and the ACTFL Executive Council as well as representatives from language teaching groups in the United States. It is anticipated that the committee will first meet in the fall of 2004.
In addition to a national council, each state will be encouraged to form its own state council. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages will use its delegate assembly structure and work that they have already undertaken with state representatives from the National Network for Early Language Learning and the elementary special interest groups related to ACTFL to form some initial state coalitions. The states will also appoint an honorary chairperson and the state honorary chairpersons can be supported by the statewide language teachers organization in collaboration with state departments of education. The commissioners of education will be solicited to help each state form its coalitions and the presidents or executive directors of the state language organizations will be called upon to help provide voluntary support for the initiatives. State organizations would be formed by January 1, 2004 and would be encouraged to meet at least five times prior to the official celebrations of 2005. The state commissions, just as the national, would include representatives of business and industry, any consulates or embassies that exist within the state, international roundtables, the world affairs councils of the states, representatives from pre-kindergarten to college and university as well as community college and proprietary language schools. Private and parochial school representation will also be sought on the statewide committees. Ethnic groups and religiously affiliated language groups will be encouraged to be participants on the state committees, as will any political or elected officials -- local, regional or statewide -- who would be willing to take the lead. State governors will be encouraged to be the honorary chairs of their respective state organizations but ultimately commissioners of education in collaboration with state language groups would help to select the honorary chairs.
The purpose of the national and the state committees will be to help generate activities that are appropriate to be carried on at the national and state levels as well as to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas among groups that have traditionally not shared their thoughts on the importance of language learning. The committees would meet five times during 2004 to talk about actual events that would take place, and ways of publicizing and getting media coverage for those events.
The national and state committees will look at how language learning and learning about other cultures could be promoted in general. State coalitions will coincide with an important report about foreign language learning in the states that is being prepared by the National Association of State Boards of Education. These five meetings will provide an opportunity for the stakeholders in international education and language education to discuss ways of promoting language learning in pre-kindergarten through the adult education level. One of the myths that will be dispelled by the statewide coalition will be that language learning is a simple and easy process that can be accomplished in a year or two. It is the goal of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages to provide a lifelong opportunity for Americans to start languages early and to continue them in an articulated sequential fashion throughout their lifetime, including the study of more challenging languages. Certainly, the increased activity within our hemisphere and focus on other continents other than the North American continent make it essential that all American children have experiences learning at least one language early in life so that they have the mental and affective flexibility to pick up other languages that may be more in the strategic or economic interest of the United States.
The state committees will be asked to appoint a staff person who will file a report with the national committee following each of the state's coalition meetings. These reports of activities will then be published on the national web site and will form a basis of activities that other states may use or borrow.
Press relations and production of informational material will be coordinated by ACTFL headquarters. ACTFL will work with the Education Writers Association in Washington, D.C., to ensure that the events of the year are widely publicized in the education community. All materials will be available in downloadable format on the ACTFL web site.
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