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<h1 class="">$16M for UW foreign-language students, programs</h1>
<p class="">The University of Washington has received a $16
million grant to offer scholarships to students studying less-commonly
taught foreign languages.</p>
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<p class="">By <a href="http://search.nwsource.com/search?searchtype=cq&sort=date&from=ST&byline=Katherine%20Long">Katherine Long</a></p>
<p class="">Seattle Times higher education reporter</p>
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<p>College students with an interest in languages should pay
attention to this one: The University of Washington has received a
$16 million federal grant to support as many as 140 fellowships a year
for students who major in Chinese, Arabic, Tagalog or nearly five dozen
other less-commonly taught, but politically important, foreign
tongues.</p>
<p>The fellowships, which are scholarships available to undergraduates
and graduates, cover study for the academic year and summer fellowships.
The money will cover a good chunk of tuition and living expenses.
It also covers courses about the cultures in which those languages are
spoken. The grants will be awarded over a four-year period.</p>
<p> Less-commonly taught languages can mean any language other than
French, German and Spanish, said Resat Kasaba, the director of the UW’s
Jackson School for International Studies. </p>
<p>Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Russian would qualify, but the UW
also offers courses in Indonesian, Tagalog, Hindi, Urdu, Vietnamese,
Bengali, Khmer and about 50 others — languages that few other
institutions offer, Kasaba said.</p>
<p>It takes about two years of college-level study for native English
speakers to learn a language with roots similar to English, and about
three years to learn a language that is dissimilar, Kasaba said.</p>
<p>The U.S. Department of Education awards these kinds of
foreign-language grants every four years, and they are designed to help
the U.S. enhance its leadership role in world markets and scholarship.
The award announced last week included 269 grants totaling $63 million;
the UW surpassed all other institutions in total grant money awarded.</p>
<p>The funding pays for instructors, as well as covering the
scholarships. Some money will also be used for outreach to K-12 schools.</p>
<p>Kasaba said students who become fluent in less-commonly taught
languages are extremely competitive for jobs after they graduate — the
ability to speak another language is helpful in almost any field of
work, he said. </p>
<p>“There’s so much going on in Seattle that’s international,” said
Kasaba, rattling off some of the area’s big companies that do business
globally: Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks. Speaking another language “is a
big, big asset” in finding a job, he said.</p>
<p>The Jackson School also received another prestigious grant this
month, a $1 million award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to
establish a new International Policy Institute. The money will allow the
UW to train Jackson School faculty to better communicate their
knowledge to nonacademic audiences.</p>
<p>“It will bridge the gap between academia and the policy world,” Kasaba said. </p>
<p>And the school has added a new master’s degree in international
studies. The one-year degree is “fully integrated with what’s going on
in Seattle,” Kasaba said, and can help professionals who want to
accelerate their careers in the foreign-affairs arena.</p>
<p>For more information about the language fellowships, go to the
Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship page on the UW website: <a class="" href="http://jsis.washington.edu/advise/flas/index.shtml">http://jsis.washington.edu/advise/flas/index.shtml</a></p><p><br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------
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