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There has been a recent upsurge of interest in languages generally thought of as less commonly taught in traditional world language education. In the United States, for example, languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, while still only a small part of the foreign language educational landscape, have begun to experience steady or growing enrollments in schools (Modern Language Association, 2007), and are beginning to be attractive alternatives as curricular offerings at all educational levels. Aside from the enrollment trends, there is interest in expanding instruction in less commonly taught languages such as Chinese in the lower grades, with the eventual goal to have longer articulated learning sequences (Asia Society, 2010).
With selected U.S. states developing roadmaps to meet the demands of diverse populations, there is a new importance placed upon the nurturing of heritage language learners, or those who grow up speaking a second language at home but who often do not develop literacy skills in these languages. Within the American context, heritage learners are now considered an important priority in maintaining national language capacity (Brecht & Rivers, 2000; Brecht & Walton, 1993) with specific instructional needs that must be addressed (He, 2008; Koda, Zhang, & Yang, 2008; Kondo-Brown, 2010; Montrul, 2010). To meet these challenges, states are also beginning programs (Asia Society, 2010; Falsgraf & Spring, 2007) in the early grades that employ immersion and bilingual models of language education whereby content is learned in the target language, thus providing alternatives to more traditional foreign language education models.
As well, the Flagship language initiative makes a variety of less commonly taught languages such as Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Persian, and Russian available with the goal of taking students to superior levels of proficiency, levels that have not been attainable through traditional sequences of language exposure offered in university settings. As less commonly taught languages begin their ascent, initiatives designed to prepare teachers have begun with programs such as STARTALK, a U.S. government initiative which over the past three years has begun summer programs nationwide to train teachers in Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Swahili, Turkish, Persian, and Urdu.
The majority of these languages are also of interest for educators and researchers because they share something in common that is...