STARTALK Leadership Forum Plans for Mainstreaming Arabic and Chinese Instruction in U.S. Schools

Monday, March 5, 2007

The STARTALK Project recently held a forum to begin planning for the mainstreaming of programs in Arabic and Chinese into U.S. schools. This forum assembled key language professionals to discuss program implementation and the resources needed to ensure that the programs would meet the needs of the communities they will serve. The short-term goal of this forum was to provide information and resources for the STARTALK program grantees for summer 2007, but an even more important long-term goal was to provide the necessary elements of an infrastructure that would ultimately serve Arabic and Chinese programs at the PK-12 level across the country.

This was the first time that a cross section of the leadership from both the Chinese and Arabic professional educators' groups were assembled to discuss the challenging issues surrounding teaching these languages in public schools. Familiar with the issues that teachers and administrators face in implementing Chinese and Arabic, the leadership group quickly began to address the resources that were already available as well as those that still needed to be developed. The group facilitators, Christine Brown, Glastonbury Public Schools (CT), and Marty Abbott, American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), led general discussions of current theory and practice surrounding highly effective standards-based instruction within the PK-12 context of American schools. Each group of language professionals then identified the specifics of these issues relating respectively to Chinese or Arabic. Staff from the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) provided additional expertise and input into the discussions. NFLC staff included Catherine Ingold, Betsy Hart, Gerald Lampe, Myriam Met, and consultant Shuhan Wang from the Asia Society.

During the three and a half day meeting, the group grappled with myriad issues but the results exceeded the expectations of all involved. At the end of the meeting, the group had identified the criteria for high quality curriculum, assessments, and instruction as well as an entire bank of resources that could be made available to STARTALK grantees. An outline of the elements of a website has provided the format for the mechanism by which the information will be shared. The framework and some initial resources and information will be ready to share at the STARTALK grantees meeting on March 9-11. Additions will be made regularly to the website with the intention that the website will eventually provide comprehensive information to those interested in implementing programs nationwide.