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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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