PROVO — It didn't take long after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack for national security chiefs to find a hole in the country's intelligence team: Agents who spoke Arabic.
"A few days later the FBI started hollering they didn't have enough people with the language skills," said Kirk Belnap, an Arabic professor at Brigham Young University.
A new national resource center — to be headquartered at BYU — aims to help correct the shortage of Americans who have a working knowledge of Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish.
The target: students and teachers in U.S. schools.
The National Middle East Language Resource Center, made up of 20 universities with top-notch language programs, was founded with a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The confirmation letter arrived Tuesday.
Belnap said the consortium, which includes such universities as Emory, Georgetown and Princeton, will receive $360,000 for its maiden year. Officials have guaranteed funding for four years.
After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Belnap said he was "inundated with journalists" asking about the immediate need for agents fluent in Middle Eastern tongues.
"I tried to open their eyes to the bigger picture," Belnap said. "Your best bet in terms of national security is international understanding."
Belnap, as the center's director, will work with four boards that will oversee research and develop teacher training programs in the four languages — Hebrew, Persian, Turkish and Arabic.
He envisions the center as a virtual gateway to the top Middle East language experts and programs across the country.
Educators seeking grants to expand courses that focus on Middle East languages also can use the center as a resource.
"We want to provide tools to help students make wise choices about studying lesser-known languages," Belnap said.
First, though, the consortium must study the needs of schools, especially elementary and secondary schools, which historically haven't taught courses in lesser-known tongues.
The center housed at BYU will help "create an infrastructure" to help teachers know how the best ways to approach classes in the lesser-known languages, said Dilworth B. Parkinson, chairman of BYU's department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages.
Belnap also wants to develop a course for Provo High School to jump-start interest in Middle Eastern cultures and languages.
Another project calls for the creation of a Web-based student guide to address the "how to" of learning a Middle Eastern language. Distance learning via high-tech means also is a focus.
The federal education department started sponsoring national foreign-language resource centers when Congress in 1988 revamped the country's Higher Education Act.
In part, the initiative targets the estimated shortage of language experts needed in a global marketplace.
Changes in the act allow the education secretary to chose a "small number" of universities to help "improve the capacity to teach and learn foreign languages effectively."
Nine other centers receive federal funding to conduct and publish research, develop new ways to teach lesser-known languages and find ways to teach languages via technology.
Sponsorship of intensive summer courses also are required.
But Belnap said colleagues at other schools agreed it would be too taxing for a single university to serve as a national resource hub for all Middle Eastern languages. So the schools joined forces.
Sandra Rogers, BYU's vice president for international affairs, said the university is "excited to be part of a initiative that enhances our national capacity to communicate with an important segment of the global community."
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