Richard Schmidt, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Title:  SLA and US National Foreign Language Education Policy

Abstract: Since the world learns English, do Americans need to learn other languages? If so, which languages out of the six or seven thousand that are spoken in the world? Spanish is the people’s choice, but the US government currently encourages programs that teach Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, and languages in the Indic, Iranian, and Turkic language families (source: US Department of Education “final priorities” for discretionary grant programs in FY 2007-2008). Starting from a rather narrow definition of foreign language policy as overt intervention by a central government to promote particular foreign languages or language skills when the free interplay of market forces fails to satisfy national needs, I will describe the evolution of a major strand of US foreign language policy spanning the half century between the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the National Security Language Initiative of 2006. This requires consideration of the political context of national policy (the Cold War, globalization, American hegemony and resistance, petro-politics, terrorism), but the focus of my presentation will be on what can be said about the opportunities, problems, and prospects for success of current policies from an SLA perspective. Specific topics include the length of time it takes to learn a language and the way in which interlanguages develop over time; age effects and the putative benefits of early instruction; the importance of input, interaction and instruction in different contexts; changing perspectives on the nature of learning and effective pedagogy; the role of individual differences; attitudes towards bilingualism (overt and covert) and their relationship to policies that support or undermine official FL policy; and the ways in which SLA research may influence and is certain to be influenced by official policies.

  
Bio-statement:  Dick Schmidt (AAAL President, 2003-2004) is a professor of Second Language Studies and director of the National Foreign Language Resource Center at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. His primary research areas are cognitive and affective factors in adult second and foreign language learning (such as the role of attention and the importance of motivation in learning), sociolinguistics (both macro and micro), and the particular problems of learning and teaching difficult, less commonly-taught languages.

Please direct questions to aaal2007@indiana.edu  *  Costa Mesa, California  *  April 21-24, 2007