Foreign language initiative.

Addressing the recent U.S. University Presidents Summit on International Education, President Bush proposed a new $114 million national initiative on the teaching of critical foreign languages. The initiative, which would be administered jointly by the Departments of Education, State, and Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has three broad goals:

* increase the number of Americans mastering critical need languages and start at a younger age;

* increase the number of advanced-level speakers of foreign languages, with an emphasis on critical needs languages; and

* increase the number of foreign language teachers and the resources for them.

Education's Fiscal Year 2007 budget proposal will have $57 million for the initiative: $24 million for the revised Foreign Language Assistant Program (FLAP); $24 million for new college-based language partnerships with 24 school districts; $5 million to recruit 1,000 foreign language teachers by 2010 (Language Teacher Corps); $3 million to expand Teacher-to-Teacher seminars to reach thousands of foreign language teachers; and $1 million for a new e-learning language clearinghouse. According to the Center for Applied Linguistics, only 31 percent of American elementary schools (24 percent of public elementary schools) report teaching foreign languages, and 79 percent focus on giving introductory exposure to a language, rather than achieving overall proficiency. And, only 44 percent of American high school students are enrolled in foreign language classes--69 percent in Spanish and 18 percent in French. Less than one percent of American high school students, combined, study Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Russian, or Urdu. FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE GO TO http://exchanges.state.gov/universitysummit/.