Defense Language Institute, Essay Example

The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) is one of the highest-recognized foreign language instruction institutions across the United States.  It is located at the Presidio of Monterey in California, and offers residential instruction to students five days a week.  The DLIFLC has over 1,700 highly-educated teachers and over 98% of these individuals are native speakers of the languages they teach.  The institution is one of the few foreign language institutes that can boast such a claim, and provides for excellent educational immersion techniques provided to its students.  Over 24 languages and a multitude of dialects are offered to the roughly 3,500 Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, Airmen, and select members of the Department of Defense and U.S. Coast Guard.  The DLIFLC offers programs for all types of languages proficiencies from brand new beginners to well-experienced refresher courses for individuals all over the world.

The foreign language instruction courses take place in eight separate language schools, including the new Emerging Languages Task Force (ELTF) that focuses efforts on teaching highly demanded languages based on needs of sponsoring government agencies.  Each student receives instruction for five days a week, requiring seven hours a day of in-class instruction and roughly three additional hours of homework every night.  Additionally, the courses offered at DLIFLC can last anywhere between 26–64 weeks depending on the difficulty of the language and the particular course being offered.  Each course is designed to improve language proficiency in speaking, listening, reading and writing skills.

The students at DLIFLC also receive an additional learning advantage over other institutions to advance the knowledge in the specific language.  An immersion program is designed for students to travel to an off-site location away from Monterey and requires students to spend one to three days isolated in a foreign environment with their instructors and no person is allowed to speak any English.  This program has been statistically validated as being an excellent precursor to language proficiency and learning by taking the students away from their comfort zones and forcing them to learn to communicate in a new way.  To ensure that the students are properly equipped, the facility has kitchens and sleeping quarters for all of the students and faculty.  The program also utilizes “real world” exercises in order to give students logical application scenarios for their language.  The program uses exercises such as bargaining for food and clothing in a foreign marketplace, going through customs at an airport travel center, or even making hotel reservations to a foreign speaker.  The DLIFLC has another immersion program where students can be sent to foreign countries such as Egypt, Korea, China and the Ukraine to be completely immersed in the foreign language and culture.

While most of the students receive instruction on-site or through immersion programs, non-resident or post-basic instruction is also available.  These courses are provided through the Continuing Education directorate that is located at Ord Military Community in Seaside, California nearby Monterey.  The Continuing Education directorate offers intermediate, advanced and refresher courses to help increase the language proficiency of individuals that have prior knowledge in a foreign language.  Due to an inability for every student to be on-site or receive instruction in California, the DLIFLC has developed Language Training Detachments (LTD) at 13 different sites throughout the United States where demand from military branches is high.  Instructors are assigned to teach sustainment and enhancement courses at these LTD sites and offer an additional educational opportunity for members of the armed forces and public officials needed sustainment of previous knowledge of enhancement of their current foreign language proficiency levels.

The Field Support and Special Programs division of DLIFLC is also located within the Continuing Education directorate at Ord Military Community.  This division within DLIFLC provides basic language and cultural awareness training to service members that are in a pre-deployment status of service.  This program helps to provide training for the armed forces as they prepare to enter a foreign environment with an unfamiliar language and culture.  Over the entire year, teams of mobile instructors travel to deliver brief periods of hands-on training for units where military services have expressed high demand.  The DLIFLC institution produces Language Survival Kits (LSK) to support the American forces as they deploy forces internationally.  The LSKs are small pamphlets that can fit inside a pocket or small compartment.  The kits contain CDs that are designed to be directly used in the field, and the topics covered by the kits can range from search and localized cultural communication to medical terminology in the foreign languages.  The LSKs are utilized for more than 30 languages throughout the world.  More than 250,000 LSKs are shipped around the world to American forces that have been deployed.

Due to the rising need of fluency in Middle Eastern languages, the DLIFLC has designed a new program entitled “Headstart” that provides an immersion DVD-Rom that teaches basic language, culture and brief lessons for reading and writing.  The encoded program on the Headstart DVD-Rom contains similar interactive software as many computer games sold on the retail market in the United States.  Research has shown that individuals within the forces, typically being younger learners, are more apt to sustain attention if the software has been catered to their needs and technological background.

The DLIFLC institution has a much different faculty breakdown than many other similar institutions.  The faculty members are separated onto teaching teams that are comprised of six faculty members.  These teaching teams are able to focus their educational efforts and individualized instruction techniques on student groups ranging from six to eight individuals per teaching team.  Only faculty members with excellent language skills and prior academic experiences are able to become hired by the foreign language institute.  The DLIFLC offers a tenure track for full-time faculty that includes federal benefits and highly competitive salaries compared to collegiate and other foreign language institutions.  Besides the important aspect of classroom and field instruction, the faculty members are also assigned the responsibility of writing course materials for the Curriculum Development Division, design the cumulative Defense Language Proficiency Tests, and conduct industry and field research and analysis of changes in the socioeconomic cultural environments around the world.  In addition to these responsibilities many of the instructors also teach within many of the military schools such as the Command and General Staff College, the Air War College, and Naval Postgraduate School.  The institution places a high value on professionalism and continued educational advancement and experience by the faculty members to ensure the best education for its students.

Finally, the DLIFLC is fully accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Community & Junior Colleges of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.  The foreign language institution offers an Associate of Arts degree in foreign language to all students that have completed the course and are able to transfer 15 general education credits from another accredited educational institution.  The DLIFLC operates under the philosophy that language acquisition depends on how well the individual understands the culture, religion, belief and value systems, economic strata, and geo-political climate of a particular nation.  Therefore, the institution’s foreign language educational system in Monterey, California has been structured to address these varying issues for each of its many students throughout the world.

References

DLI-Alumni.org. (n.d.). Mission dliaa. Retrieved from http://www.dli-alumni.org/mission_statement.htm

DLIFLC.edu. (n.d.). About Dliflc. Retrieved from http://www.dliflc.edu/about.html

Kruzel, J.J. (2009, February 11). Defense language institute rolls out new programs. United States Department of Defense News, Retrieved from http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=53053

Simmons, C. (2009, April 7). The Defense language institute foreign language center. Associated Content, Retrieved from http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1610290/the_defense_language_institute_foreign.html%20target=?cat=9