[EDLING:1427] Story from statenews.com

[fmhult at DOLPHIN.UPENN.EDU]

MSU coordinates teaching of Arabic
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MSU coordinates teaching of Arabic
Published April 5, 2006
by JOSH JARMAN
MSU will coordinate the Michigan arm of a national language initiative to teach more people to speak Arabic.  

The National Strategic Language Initiative, first announced at a conference of U.S. university presidents in Washington attended by MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon, is a $114-million initiative proposed by President Bush to keep the country globally competitive and increase national security.  

To make the U.S. military, as well as the intelligence and business communities, more effective, they need to have a strong sense of international culture and be able to communicate fluently with other parts of the world, Simon said during the conference in January.  

The Michigan Arabic experiment will invest $700,000 in federal funds annually for as many as 16 years to expose K-12 students to the language.  

The federal grants would pay teacher salaries and other costs of teaching the language in grades K-12 and college as part of an experiment that could expand nationwide, Robert Slater, director of the Defense Department\'s National Security Education Program, said Monday.   

Susan Gass, a distinguished professor of linguistics and director of the English Language Center, said MSU was selected to oversee the state\'s piece of the initiative because of its long tradition of language studies and international outreach.   

\"We have a large less-commonly taught languages program,\" Gass said. \"We are a perfect target for this activity.\"  

Gass, who has been put in charge of distributing funds for the state experiment, said she will be working with the university to develop the program this summer, so the details of how it will operate have not been worked out.   

\"First we need to determine the capacity for teaching and interest in the state,\" Gass said.   

She said the project will probably get its start in only a couple of school districts to serve as prototypes, which can then be expanded nationally. No districts have been chosen yet, but Gass said it is the university\'s intention to make this a statewide initiative.  

\"I\'ve already gotten a lot of e-mails from school districts expressing interest in this,\" Gass said. \"I haven\'t even had the time to look at them all yet.\"  

The classes could begin as early as fall 2007, Slater said.   

Gass doesn\'t know whether teachers for the initiative will be taught on campus or in their respective districts; that is what the summer planning period would be all about, she said.  

\"Some could be Arabic speakers who have not been trained to teach; others might be teachers who need to brush up on their language skills,\" Gass said. \"So it might be easier to have workshops in their districts.\"  

Schools in Dearborn, which has one of the largest Arab-American communities in the country, already teach Arabic as an elective. The language also is taught at mosques and Islamic schools in the area.  

Malik Balla, an Arabic language assistant professor, said MSU has seen an increase in the number of students taking the language in the last few years, enough so that the department added another instructor. He said there are usually about 100 students who take it each fall.  

Students who know some Arabic coming into the program used to make up most of the class, but those numbers are changing.  

\"Now the ones who know it already are in the minority,\" Balla said.  

The Associated Press contributed to this report.


http://www.statenews.com/article.phtml?pk=35645