A Brief History of the National Foreign Language Center
A Giant Leap Forward
In 1993 the NFLC published a paper entitled National Strategic Planning in the Less Commonly Taught Languages by Richard Brecht and Ronald Walton, both subsequently directors of the NFLC, about the need for a revolution in foreign language learning in the United States. The paper called for a shift away from the almost exclusive focus on Western European languages in the nation's schools to a new policy emphasizing the development of substantive capacity in less commonly taught, morphologically challenging languages such as Arabic, Chinese, and other Asian languages and African languages, among others. Less than five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and almost a decade before the horrific attacks of 9/11, the authors called for the construction of a foreign language "architecture" in the United States that reflected the new non-Eurocentric geopolitical exigencies: exigencies which the United States, the authors argued, could ill afford to ignore.
By the fall of 2001, events brought heightened urgency to the need for a new focus on the teaching of languages long neglected in the U.S., the new focus advocated by Brecht and Walton back in the early 1990s. These events had a direct impact on the trajectory of certain NFLC projects. Specifically, about this time the NFLC received a federal grant to revisit its earlier LangNet 1.0 project with the goal of providing, not just bibliographical and training materials, but also direct on-line instruction. What subsequently emerged was LangNet 2.0 (now simply dubbed "LangNet"), a massive web-based foreign language training system which provides students with increasingly sophisticated lessons, or "learning objects," based on original, foreign language materials (articles, addresses, reports, and audio clips). LangNet has since grown to include 4,500 instructional hours in some 33 languages, most of them less commonly taught (the exceptions being Spanish and, more recently, French and Italian). One of its many features is a "learning object" authoring tool that provides instructors with user-friendly templates with which to create pedagogically rigorous lessons. This cyberspace program soon grew beyond its designers' original objectives. In the relatively brief period of its existence, LangNet has become one of the U.S. government's premier resources for foreign language training.
As a result of LangNet, the NFLC staff has grown exponentially in recent years and now counts among its ranks, not only foreign language pedagogues and policy analysts, but also, instructional designers, content development managers, multimedia professionals (including video and web design experts), quality assurance editors, foreign language translators, information technology specialists, audio technicians, and an ever-expanding network of foreign language consultants, native speakers of languages supported by LangNet and trained by the NFLC to develop LangNet learning objects. Having witnessed this growth firsthand as LangNet's Principal Investigator, Dr. Catherine Ingold, now also Director of the NFLC, decided to leverage this expertise and pool of resources for an entirely new initiative focused on the U.S. domestic arena. The NFLC consequently launched in 2004 the Language Access Initiative a program involving projects designed to alleviate the extreme shortage of trained interpreters in the American health care field as well as in federal, state, and local government. Now well into its second year, the initiative has amassed a wealth of information which it is channeling into a series of project proposals. LangNet too has gained a new, or rather additional, focus when the NFLC received a USED grant in 2006 to develop LangNet learning objects in Chinese for K-12 students. What remains to be told has yet to become "history."
