While the daily news is full of tumultuous conversations about Russia and China, 91ֿ has been helping some area high school students learn to converse in Russian and Chinese to facilitate greater global understanding and a less contentious tomorrow.
91ֿ’s Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences received federal funding for the 12th consecutive year to host the fully immersive STARTALK Summer Foreign Language Academy this past summer. Twenty students from Northeast Ohio learned Russian or Chinese language and culture – 10 in each course – hopefully on their way to becoming translational scholars.
The $90,000 grant comes from the U.S. National Security Administration and is administered by the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland. 91ֿ has received more than $2 million in STARTALK funds since 2007 and is considered a model institution. The academy is in its 13th year, but the first year was supported entirely by an Ohio Board of Regents grant.
Program Director Brian Baer, Ph.D., professor of Russian translation, said the four-week residential curriculum prepares students to enter college as language majors.
“With languages, it used to be you had to spend three to four years before you could do anything with it,” he said. “They’re not only learning the language, though. They learn a lot about the culture. We bring native speakers into the classroom, and the students Skype with people in the countries.”
Students are immersed immediately and entirely in the language. They then participate in a mandatory full academic year follow-up process. Baer said students who complete the program usually are placed into intermediate college courses.
“We also introduce them to career paths using foreign languages,” he said. “Most students can only think of being a high school language teacher, but this field is on par with nursing as one of the fastest growing sectors of the U.S. economy. Our program focuses on professional skills and careers, and that’s one of the reasons we were chosen as an infrastructure program.”
Last year’s STARTALK grant provided 91ֿ with infrastructure building funds to develop videos and lesson plans that will be made available for other programs through the STARTALK website.
Betsy Hart, interim executive director of the National Foreign Language Center and STARTALK program director, said that while 91ֿ’s model and materials aren’t mandatory for other institutions, they would be wise to consider implementing a similar model and adapting their materials to their programs.
“I’ve had the privilege of visiting the 91ֿ program several years ago, and there are several factors that contribute to 91ֿ’s success,” she said. “We’re pretty prescriptive about the way we plan and the instructional strategies that need to be included, and Brian and his team take it very seriously and are very diligent about incorporating those strategies into their classrooms, so it’s been an exemplary program.”
Baer said the STARTALK program began in the wake of 9/11 when the U.S. Intelligence Community saw mounds of untranslated intelligence and a dearth of translators. STARTALK provides programming to teach 11 languages, many of them germane to the Middle East. But he and Hart both see the importance of the languages in 91ֿ’s program.
“We can be shortsighted sometimes,” he said. “When communism fell, they took Russian off that list, but I think both countries will remain strategically important for a long time.”
“We have political concerns and trading concerns,” Hart said. “There will be a demand for speakers of these languages in any career they may want to pursue.”
Hart said students who get early starts in learning a second language will have an advantage should they pursue government careers. She noted reports of the high costs for the government to train one individual in a language.
“The intelligence community would love for new hires to be able to walk in the door and go to work,” she said.
Beyond that, however, Baer said teaching students other languages is just a great way to develop more worldly citizens – the primary objective of 91ֿ’s Global Understanding Research Initiative, which includes Baer and other faculty from the Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies.
“There’s a great quote from Nelson Mandela,” Baer said. “‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’”