Richard D. Brecht

National Strategic Planning in the Less Commonly Taught Languages

A rapidly changing world order has prompted renewed interest in providing a national capacity for dealing with languages and cultures beyond those of Western Europe. In particular, much recent attention has been directed toward strengthening instruction in the less commonly taught languages. The authors suggest that past approaches to providing this capacity have been of only limited success and that a national less commonly taught language strategic planning process should be initiated, aimed at creating a new architecture for managing the delivery of instruction in these languages.

Second Language Needs Analysis: Language needs analysis at the societal level

Introduction At the societal level, the need for language is generally defined within very general social goals, such as ‘national security’, ‘social justice’, or the like. The purpose of associating language with goals like these is to motivate policy and planning for language education at the national, state, or local level, or within the federal language education system. In an ideal world, every policy and intervention at the societal level would be discussed, based on an explicit cost-benefit analysis of the contribution of the intervention to the societal good. This would presume a clear specification of the contribution of the specific intervention domain (e.g., language) to the societal goal (e.g., national security), together with the qualifications of the responsible implementing agent (e.g., the Department of Defense and/or the higher education system). Such specification entails an economic approach, which involves specific description of the elements involved and the correlation of cost and benefit. An economic approach to the language issue treats language as amenable to market analysis that describes its behavior and provides information to policy makers for their decisions on how to invest scarce public resources. It starts from the perspective that there exists a market for language in a given country, one which can be more or less well described, and which can be influenced by policy interventions from a centralized government body.

Policy Issues in Foreign Language and Study Abroad

As exchange and study abroad programs proliferate and the range of countries and languages involved broadens, the role of language competence in such programs is in vital need of examination. Long-neglected policy issues, like standards and assessment as well as program design and management, must be addressed. Programs relying on or developing language competence are in need of a new national architecture, which brings to bear expertise from the field of second language acquisition, target languages and cultures, and exchange and study management.

The foreign language perspective

Abstract 1. Introduction The goal of this special issue is to present current research in the pragmatics of different languages from a foreign language perspective. What we mean by a ‘‘foreign language perspective’’ is the analysis and explication of the use of a particular language in a foreign language setting from the perspective of non-native speakers and / or in relation to other languages. The authors in this issue focus on a variety of languages, including Catalan, French, German, Persian, Russian, and Spanish. In their papers, these languages are usually related, compared and / or contrasted with English or other languages from an intercultural or cross-cultural viewpoint.