English for Heritage Language Speakers Program

Here's an innovative approach to addressing the shortage of federal employees with advanced levels of profiency in international languages. Few native English speakers in America reach high levels of proficiency in other languages because of our nation's poor track record in foreign language education. Many kids from immigrant families who enter school bilingual come out monolingual or have limited skills in their HL, due to our horrible language and education policies which focus on English only. So, let's take those adults who have advanced HL skills and help them learn enough English to work for the federal government. We're much better at teaching English in this country than we are other languages.

Now in its third year, CAL's English for Heritage Language Speakers (EHLS)
program gives native speakers of critical languages the advanced professional
English proficiency they need to succeed in the federal workplace. For 2008, our
program partners, the University of Washington (Seattle) and Georgetown
University (Washington, DC), have enrolled a total of twelve Arabic speakers,
two Cantonese speakers, eight Mandarin speakers, three Dari speakers, one Farsi
speaker, one Hindi speaker, one Russian speaker, and four Indonesian speakers. Learn more.