Secretary Clinton to Address 2010 Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants on Thursday, December 9
Notice to the PressOffice of the SpokesmanWashington, DC
December 8, 2010
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will address the 2010 Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants (FLTA) on Thursday, December 9th at 3:00 p.m. in the Dean Acheson Auditorium of the Department of State. The FLTA Program brings young English teachers to the United States to serve as native language teaching resources in American classrooms, and is a key element in the U.S. government's effort to strengthen both English language teaching abroad and foreign language instruction at U.S. colleges and universities.
This academic year, 418 Fulbright FLTA participants from 49 countries are teaching a total of 31 languages on U.S. campuses in 48 states and the District of Columbia.
For more information on the full schedule of the conference and the Fulbright Program, click here.
Secretary Clinton will recognize the contributions that Fulbright FLTA participants make on U.S. university campuses by teaching critical need foreign languages. Secretary Clinton will also encourage program participants to capitalize on their time and opportunity to study in the U.S., and share their experience with their communities when they return home. Assistant Secretary of Educational and Cultural Affairs Ann Stock will deliver introductory remarks for Secretary Clinton.
To pick those 418 FLTAs there were panelists who read tons of applications and evaluated them according to Fulbright criteria. I sit on those panels. It is work done on your own time and gratis. You receive a box of multipage applications. I had just under 70 last year. There were 85 this year. That was just for my group. I read on my lunch hour for 5 or 6 weeks and on panel day, I spent the day. It was very organized and very nice with lunch in the delegates dining room at the UN. To arrive at this number of 418 awardees, panels read through thouands of applications.
They send you a letter of recognition. (The president of my university also received a copy. Who knows if he really saw it?) Most of my colleagues refuse to do this work. It is a wonderful experience to read some of these applications and "meet" the young people with their aspirations. It would be even more wonderful if the panelists could also meet the SOS.
