Arabic-L:GEN:New Middle East LRC Announced

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Thu 29 Aug 2002
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:New Middle East LRC Announced

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1)
Date:  29 Aug 2002
From:Kirk Belnap <rkb at byu.edu>
Subject:New Middle East LRC Announced

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced the creation of the  
National Middle East Language Resource Center, the first Title VI  
Language Resource Center to focus solely on the languages of the Middle  
East. The center will be headquartered at Brigham Young University and  
represents a consortium of language experts from more than twenty  
universities. Kirk Belnap, BYU associate professor of Arabic, will  
serve as the center's director.  The associate directors, each charged  
with primary oversight of one of the major languages of the region,  
are: Mahmoud Al-Batal (Arabic), Emory University; Shmuel Bolozky  
(Hebrew), the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; Erika H. Gilson  
(Turkish), Princeton University; Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak (Persian),  
University of Washington.
The center will work with the country's Middle East language  
professionals and  other Title VI centers to coordinate efforts aimed  
at increasing and improving opportunities for learning the languages of  
the Middle East.  The center will also undertake and support projects  
in areas such as teacher training, materials development, testing and  
assessment, integration of pedagogy and technology, study abroad, and  
K-12 programs.  It will work across the four Middle East language  
groups (as well as with smaller language fields, such as Kurdish) to  
foster cooperation and joint utilization of expertise and resources.
The center will begin by surveying the needs of each language field and  
then work closely with each to create a strategic plan to be  
implemented in stages.  A significant portion of the center's funds  
from the Department of Education will be used for its grants program.   
These grants will serve as seed money to attract matching funds from  
other institutions and encourage broad field participation.  These  
grants will target the development of materials and programs that  
complement the center's other projects in building an integrated system  
of language learning support.

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End of Arabic-L:  29 Aug 2002