Kent State University professors Brian James Baer, Ph.D., and Theresa Minick, both from the Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, have been awarded two federal government STARTALK grants, totaling $225,000, to support the Regents Foreign Language Academy, a summer language-immersion program for Ohio high school students.
The four-week student program targets new learners of Chinese and Russian from high schools across the state of Ohio. The grants also support the Teacher Leadership Academy, a 10-day professional development program for K-12 teachers of these languages, who will have the opportunity to observe and teach in the student program.
Founded in 2007 with a grant from the Ohio Board of Regents (now the Ohio Department of Higher Education), the student academy has been funded since 2008 by the federal government STARTALK program, a post-9/11 initiative, whose purpose is to promote the study of critical need languages in the United States. The academy has graduated more than 400 students.
Many alumni of the Foreign Language Academy have continued to study these languages in colleges and universities across the United States, and to pursue a variety of career paths requiring proficiency in a foreign language.
For more information about the Foreign Language Academy at Kent State, visit www.kent.edu/mcls/fla.
For more information about Kent State’s Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, visit www.kent.edu/mcls.
