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The U.S. Department of Education announced on Monday, May 1 that it has awarded
the Critical Languages Program at The University of Arizona more than $441,000
over the next three years for developing urgently needed instructional
courseware in Kurdish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. The grant emerges from a keen
competition sponsored by the Title VI International Research and Studies (IR/S)
program.
The grant's principal investigator is Alexander Dunkel, Director of the UA
Critical Languages Program. Dr. Dunkel is also the President of the National
Association of Self-Instructional Language Programs (NAISILP), a post he has
held for the past eight years. The chief engineer for the project is Scott
Brill, who has designed and managed the technical development of the Critical
Languages Series from its inception in 1996.
The specific languages to be addressed by the grant are Beginning Kurdish,
Intermediate Ukrainian, and Advanced Turkish. The Critical Languages Series has
already developed introductory courseware for Turkish and Ukrainian as part of
its ongoing efforts over the past decade (see http://clp.arizona.edu/cls/ for
more information on the series).
During the past decade Critical Languages has produced courseware on CD-ROM and
DVD-ROM for seven high-priority languages: Brazilian-Portuguese, Cantonese,
Chinese, Kazakh, Korean, Turkish, and Ukrainian.
To produce this courseware, the CLP team, working with NASILP and the UA
Computer-Assisted Language Instruction group, has secured nearly $1.5 million
in external support, confirming the emergence of the Critical Languages team as
one of the nation's most important and productive sources of courseware for
learning less commonly taught languages.
During the spring 2006 semester, the Critical Languages Program has enrolled
more than 300 students in 15 different languages not offered through regular UA
departments.
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