The Strategic Evolution Of The U.S. Education Policy On Critical Languages

Critical languages (CL) are those foreign languages and dialects which have been defined by the U.S. Government as being critical to the national security, economic prosperity, science and research, global competitiveness and other national needs. The U.S. government has been advocating CL education since the height of the Cold War in the1950s. The terrorist attack on September11,2001highlighted the national foreign language deficiency, and became a key impetus for the U.S. government to make a new national strategic plan for training an a sufficient cadre of highly proficient speakers in critical languages.This dissertation examines the evolution of CL education policies and their implementation from1958till2015in the model of the U.S national security interests, which covers the following questions: Why is it that the CL education policies are defined as security-oriented strategic planning? In what way has the CL strategy been developed and implemented? How is the ultimate CL strategic framework formulated? How do we evaluate the CL strategy concerning its achievements and challenges?It is argued that the US CL education policies are top-town, security-oriented, language-crisis-driven strategic plans for training linguistic experts with the goal of boosting national language capacity. The utmost nature of the policies lies in sustaining the U.S. leadership in the international order. On the track of the history of CL education strategy, the strategic significance of CL increased or declined along with the shifts of the U.S. security strategies. The findings show that,1) the government views CL as one of strategic forces, which helps to win the war, promote the American values, improve the global competitiveness and to maintain the U.S. global leadership;2) their strategic evolution of CL can be marked off and analyzed in terms of three historical periods:developing period in the Cold War, expanding period after the Cold War, and remodeling period in the early21st century;3) the U.S. government has formulated a coordinated, multi-agency strategic framework by means of cooperating with higher education institutions carrying out various CL programs;4) the government goal of increasing national language capacity have been met to some degree, but the new challenges have to be faced;5) other factors such as the international order and domestic politics are identified as of vital forces in shaping CL strategies.This dissertation recommends that, China should increase language strategy awareness, and take measures to increase national language capacity,’language skills" plus "area studies" training model should be pursued in foreign language education. Moreover, it is imperative to identify a number of languages as critical for our national language education strategy.