BYU Chinese Flagship Announcements

Here’s an excerpt from an article in The Chronicle for Higher Education which talks about, among other things, the role of National Flagship programs and the importance of education in “critical languages”:

A Failure to Communicate

Despite pressure from government and industry, universities do not produce enough graduates fluent in ‘critical languages’

By BURTON BOLLAG

College Park, Md.

. . .

As China’s economic and political influence has grown, enrollments in Chinese rose 75 percent to 34,000 from 1990 to 2002. Experts estimate that enrollments have increased by nearly 50 percent since then. Chinese is now the “best resourced,” of the critical languages, says Catherine W. Ingold, director of the National Foreign Language Center, a research institute at the University of Maryland. Chinese departments can draw from the large number of Chinese graduate students in the United States, though officials say it is hard to find instructors trained to teach languages. At the elementary- and secondary-school level there is an acute shortage of certified teachers of Chinese.

. . .

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