WASHINGTON — How do you bridge a language gap when you’re not sure how big that gap is, exactly, or quite where the bridge is heading in the first place?
Officials from various governmental departments in the U.S. are struggling to answer that question.
Although representatives from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the Government Accountability Office agree that having personnel who are fluent in languages other than English is becoming more and more vital, they’re struggling to measure success at attaining that goal.
Luke X. Martin/MNS
Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, is leading the charge to increase the federal government’s foreign language capabilities. “Because of the rich cultural and linguistic diversity [in Hawaii], I understand well the need to communicate … in a variety of languages,” he said at Thursday’s hearing.
A Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on Thursday began to address that issue.
“Foreign language proficiency and cultural understanding are essential to protecting our national interests,” Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, said at the hearing. “Threats to our national security are becoming more complex, interconnected and unconventional.”
Attempts to increase language proficiency among U.S government employees, though, is meeting with limited success.
A Government Accountability Office report released last year found that nearly a third of foreign service officers working in the Department of State did not meet the job’s language requirements.
“What troubles me is that 73 percent of [foreign service officers] serving in Afghanistan and 57 percent serving in Iraq do not meet the language proficiency requirements of their positions,” Akaka said.
Additionally, a Government Accountability Office report released on Thursday shows that measuring the departments’ success at bridging those language gaps is difficult at best. The study focused on efforts by the State, Defense and Homeland Security departments.
“What we found was not encouraging,” said David Maurer, who heads the Homeland Security and Justice Team at the GAO.
Maurer acknowledged that the particular results varied from one department to the next, but that, overall, U.S. workers, are not as prepared in other languages as they should be. He advocates a more systematic approach to addressing shortfalls.
“We’re not really in a position to really assess whether or not existing programs are adequate,” Maurer said. “We don’t really have a sense for what the departments actually need.”
What the departments struggle with, according to the most recent GAO findings, is how to measure success or failure while they lack a specific goal, a “comprehensive strategic plan.”
For David Chu, former undersecretary for personnel and readiness at the Defense Department, the best solution is a longer-term one.
“Through K-12 language instruction, I believe the country can build a much better base for superior linguistic success,” Chu said.
In researching this approach, Dan Davidson, president of American Councils for International Education, was encouraged.
“We established that there are 3,500 K-12 programs in the United States as of May 2009 focused on the critical languages alone,” Davidson said, twice the number experts believed existed.
American students now have “quite robust expectations of learning foreign languages, studying overseas and pursuing an internationally focused career,” he said.
Ultimately, Chu and Davidson argue, education communities are more suited to address the government’s language challenges than are defense communities.