Time well spent at the NCOLCTL/ALTA conference

Last week, four of us attended the annual conference of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL) and the African Language Teachers Association (ALTA) in Madison, Wisconsin. NCOLCTL's membership includes speakers of several of the languages we're recruiting for, including Swahili, Somali, Hausa, Indonesian and Thai.

The conference had about 300 attendees. A nice size ... as the conference progressed, all the faces became familiar and folks we spoke with would stop by to say "hi" and talk with us some more. Our table was directly behind the conference registration table, and we saw many happy reunions ... clearly this is a close group.

NLSC recruiter Bridget Baker and I were at our recruiting table. We met the Executive Director, Antonia Schleicher, a woman who brings a huge smile with her wherever she goes. Another Bill, our Chief Linguist Dr. Bill Rivers, has been involved with NCOLCTL so he already knew her, and was in the perfect position to introduce us to other attendees.

We had the pleasant surprise of meeting three attendees who are also among NLSC's Charter Members. It's nice that we've reached a point where we and Members can bump into each other at events like this. Linda, who works with Bill, speaks Swahili and was thrilled to have a chance to not only speak with others in Swahili, but to attend conference sessions conducted in Swahili.

Bill Rivers spoke in one of the conference sessions on US Language Policy Attitudes: 2000-2008. Despite the policy controversies about the English-only movement, bilingual education, the growing numbers of Americans who speak minimal English, and language and national security, there have been only sporadic studies of the state of representative public opinion on these issues. Bill discussed this study, which compares data from two surveys. (He co-authored the research with John Robinson, University of Maryland and Paul Harwood, University of North Florida.)

This week, it's on to the National Chinese Language Conference in Chicago..