Teens Can Learn Language for Free: Academy to Pick 50 Students to Study Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian

By Carol Biliczky, The Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio

Jan. 31–Kent State is offering a local first this summer — a free immersion program for high school students who want to learn one of the world’s four most difficult languages.

About 50 teens will be selected for a yearlong program in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese or Russian.

Brian Baer, director of the Foreign Language Academy and a KSU associate professor of Russian, said the school will offer a “wonderful opportunity” for students to get a leg up on a foreign language that is critically and economically vital to U.S. interests.

Unfortunately, many high schools don’t offer these languages and students who begin them in college may find they don’t have enough time to become proficient, he said.

For instance, while students need 575 to 600 hours of classroom instruction for languages closely related to English, like Spanish and French, they need 1,100 hours for Russian and 2,200 hours for Japanese, Chinese and Arabic, according to the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State. None of the numbers includes outside study on homework.

Since a typical language course is three to five hours a week or 108-180 hours per school year, students who start a challenging foreign language in college rarely become highly proficient while there, the State Department said.

The KSU academy would seek to reverse that prospect, immersing students in four weeks of on-campus study — tentatively set for June 24 to July 20 — and mini-immersion sessions on eight Saturdays throughout the school year.

Students will get a free ride — free tuition and fees, room and board in a KSU dorm, and books, plus a stipend to compensate for not being able to work during the summer session and a free laptop computer. They will be supervised in the dorms by a resident assistant fluent in their foreign language.

All will be paid through a $350,000 grant that Kent received from the Ohio Board of Regents, which coordinates higher education statewide. Bowling Green State University and Oberlin College are partners in the academy.

“This will work wonders for any students’ resume for college,” said Baer, who segued from comparative literature to Russian during college because of a love of Russian literature.

“While these languages are strategically and economically vital, these are rich cultures that need to be studied in their own right.”

Application deadline is May 1. For details, call 330-672-2150 or e-mail Baer at bbaer@kent.edu.

Carol Biliczky can be reached at 330-996-3729 or cbiliczky@thebeaconjournal.com.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio

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