| Summary: | We are at an important crossroads in the history of foreign
language learning and teaching in the United States. While the Federal
Government has been involved in the project of language learning
(or lack thereof) from its inception (Bernhardt 1999), it currently
exerts an extraordinary influence on which languages can be and are
taught in the United States. In fact, contemporary federal policy decisions
have had an unprecedented impact not only on the curricula of
universities and colleges that are funded for their language teaching
efforts, but perhaps more interestingly, on the curricula of conventional
universities. Conventional institutions are those post- secondary
institutions that offer language instruction as part of the regularly
taught liberals arts/humanities/arts and sciences curriculum
without federal funding for those endeavors.
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