State Department Language Classifications
Josh Wilson
jwilson at SRAS.ORG
Thu Jan 7 10:52:16 UTC 2010
I did some more poking around the Internet on this issue and it seems that
the Department of State does have a three (and a half?) level scale as
indicated from the several sources cited previously in this thread.
However, it seems the Department of Defense (at the Defense Language
institute) still uses the four level scale. I found this transcript on the
department's website http://tiny.cc/jusJA that seems to indicate that
Russian is a level three language and would take some 1600 classroom hours
to achieve the level that the military would want.
Excerpt from the transcript (dated March 30, 2009):
COL. SANDUSKY: Our classes are mini-immersion experiences. Our classes are
extremely intense, six or seven hours a day in the target language. However,
when the student leaves the classroom, he or she is not, you know,
duty-bound to remain in the target language...
Our courses are between 24 weeks for the, quote, "easy" languages for an
English speaker to learn -- and those would be essentially the Romance
languages: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese -- to 64 weeks in length for
the most difficult languages for an English speaker to learn: Chinese,
Arabic, Korean and Japanese.
And more than 90 percent of our students are here for what we call a
Category 3 or a Category 4 languages -- language. The Category 4 languages I
just mentioned, the Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese; and the Category 3
languages are almost everything else that you can think of: Russian, Pashtu,
Dari, Persian, Farsi, Uzbek, Urdu, Hindi, et cetera. And those Category 3
languages are 47 weeks in length, so roughly a year. So most of our students
are here for a year or more with us learning those Category 3 or 4 languages
-- that is, our resident program students.
So, unless Col Sandusky is mistaken, it seems the four-level system is still
around in the government.
Just FYI - the old info that used to be on the DLI site seemed to indicate
that a "basic professional level" of level three languages could be obtained
in about 720 classroom hours. Assuming that the program Col Sandusky is
referring to would be geared to an "advanced professional level" I would
assume that the 720 hour estimate could still be assumed to be good?
One thing that really struck me as I looked for this is that information on
language learning is not easily found on either the DoD website of the
Department of State (on either their main site or their site dedicated to
youth). The only information I found on language learning from DoD was from
this one obscure pdf document. The information I found on either site
(including this doc) I found really only through Google site-specific
searches (their internal search engines came up with nothing relevant) and
it would seem that many of those pages Google uncovered are not accessible
from the section pages they are filed under on the Dept. of State's site...
Makes me wonder just who they have running these sites and just who is
coordinating the drive to push language learning that both Bush and Obama
have said is so important.
Josh Wilson
Assistant Director
The School of Russian and Asian Studies
Editor in Chief
Vestnik, The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies
SRAS.org
jwilson at sras.org
-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list
[mailto:SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Irina Dubinina
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 8:15 PM
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] State Department Language Classifications
Dear Ben, dear SEELANGers,
I found this archived page of nvtc dated to 2007 with a listing of the three
groups of languages. The change must have happened not so recently then.
Bulgarian, as Ben suspected, is indeed part of group II. The labeling of
the categories is more "politically correct" here:
languages closely related to English
languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from
English
and
languages which are exceptionally hard to learn for native speakers of
English
Interestingly, German and Indonesian are listed separately as "other".
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/no
vember/learningExpectations.html
--- On Sun, 1/3/10, Benjamin Rifkin <rifkin at TCNJ.EDU> wrote:
From: Benjamin Rifkin <rifkin at TCNJ.EDU>
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] State Department Language Classifications
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Date: Sunday, January 3, 2010, 4:24 PM
Thanks, Jerry. Yes, I thought that Russian was now in group 2. It's
interesting that this chart shows yet another series of names for the three
groups. I have also seen "world languages," "hard languages" and "superhard
languages." So of course I wonder if the "hard languages" and "superhard
languages" are not actually of this world, since group 1 are the world
languages. (I am guessing that world languages was the euphemism for easy
languages that was not politically acceptable.)
I continue to search for the source, like a knight on some epic quest....
Yours,
Ben
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerald
McCausland" <gmmst11 at PITT.EDU>
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Sent: Sunday, January 3, 2010 8:16:27 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] State Department Language Classifications
Dear Ben:
This isn't exactly what you are asking for, but if you go to the
following link:
http://www.govtilr.org/Publications/TESOL03ReadingFull.htm
and scroll down to "Figure 2," you'll find a version of a table that
I've located on several different websites. It does indeed reduce the
categories from 4 to 3, but note the position of Russian! All webpages
with this table cite "FSI" as their source, but I've utterly failed to
track this down
to a specific page on the FSI website or to any print
publication.
Perhaps this will at least give your search some direction.
Jerry.
On 1/3/2010 5:41 PM, Benjamin Rifkin wrote:
> Dear Colleagues:
>
>
> Years ago, the State Department and Defense Department classified
languages in 4 categories, with category 1 the easiest languages to learn
(Romance languages, Swahili, Scandinavian languages, Dutch), Category 4 the
hardest (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). In this scheme, Russian was
a category 3 language, with some African languages, such as Yoruba, some
Southeast Asian languages (such as Thai). German was a category 2 language,
with Hebrew, Hindi, and some other African languages.
>
>
> Apparently the State Department and Defense Department have reduced the
number of categories from 4 to 3, renaming them not by number but with the
phrases "easy languages," "hard
languages," and "very hard languages." My understanding is that the Romance
languages remain in the "easy category", and that the languages of old
category 2 have been shifted into "easy" or "hard" (I'm not sure on which
principle), and that now Russian is in the "hard languages" category.
>
>
> I'm writing to ask SEELANGers if any of you can help me identify a source
for this change.
>
>
> With thanks,
>
>
> Ben Rifkin
--
Gerald McCausland, PhD
Lecturer and Language Program Director
Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of Pittsburgh
gmmst11 at pitt.edu
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