On July 29, 2010, Dr. Dan E. Davidson, president of American Councils, testified before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia about the state of foreign language learning in the United States. In his remarks, Davidson stressed the importance of properly integrating linguistic and cultural education in both K-12 and undergraduate curricula as well as adequately supporting faculty, administrators, policymakers and research in this effort.
Davidson highlighted two recent American Councils research reports demonstrating that U.S. education is achieving a new level of success in addressing the language gap in the Federal Government workforce, thanks to federal programs like NSEP/Flagship, NSLI, Title VI, Fubright-Hays and Title VIII, and that additional investment in these programs can help develop the capacity that is now so much in evidence. Referring to a separate American Councils study, Davidson added that young Americans are interested in learning the critical languages as never before, particularly Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, and Korean, and underscored the value of bringing more public attention to the success of K-12 world language programs while continuing to invest in and expand them.
