"Many in State Dept. Can't Talk the Talk," by Anushka Asthana - the Washington Post, 11 August 2006, p. A17 (registration required)
Nearly 30 percent of State Department employees based overseas in "language-designated positions" are failing to speak and write the local language well enough to meet required levels, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.
"We have a shortage of people with language skills in posts that need them," said John Brummet, assistant director for international affairs and trade at the GAO. "If people do not have the proper language skills, it is difficult to influence the people and government and to understand what they are thinking. It just doesn't get the job done."
Languages described as "superhard" by the report are proving particularly difficult. Four out of 10 workers in posts requiring Arabic, Chinese and Japanese fail to meet the requirements.
The levels are even higher in some critical postings. Sixty percent of State Department personnel in Sanaa, Yemen, and 59 percent in Cairo do not meet language requirements, the report said.
Even levels set by the department could be too low to do the jobs properly. According to the GAO, embassy officials in China and Yemen said the speaking and reading levels asked for were "not high enough and that staff in these positions were not sufficiently fluent to effectively perform their jobs."
But not all the news is bad. The report -- which has been sent to Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee -- said there have been positive steps: "State has made progress in increasing its foreign language capabilities, but serious language gaps remain."...
The report says some overseas postings are not long enough for staff workers to build up skills in certain languages. It recommends that the secretary of state lengthen postings in some countries. It also suggests targeting fully qualified officers at critical posts using incentives, and evaluating the effectiveness of efforts to improve language proficiency.
The findings came as no surprise to some observers. "It confirms my impressions from my time meeting with U.S. diplomats," said Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. "The language skills are poor, and often they are very cut off from the local population."
Lieven agreed with the GAO that the government could do more to encourage people to learn certain languages for critical posts with better incentives.
"Somebody who is willing to make a career in the war on terror and spend their whole career working in or about Muslim countries should be permanently on a different rate of pay," he said.
For an earlier piece on this topic, see Op Ed: US Public Diplomacy Needs More Arabic Speakers.
I'm not the most gifted of students when it comes to acquiring foreign languages myself, so my views on this topic are probably biased. That said, I do think it's important to avoid the mistake of thinking that language is the same thing as communication. An FSO with a perfect command of a foreign language is of little benefit to the US if the diplomat doesn't put those skills to work -- and that may be what happens when, as Anatol Lieven says, embassy officers are too often cut off from the publics they live among. This isolation not just a question of language skills. It's a question of institutional culture and values, and even of day-to-day work expectations and routines.
Good post. I've linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2006/08/re-gao-us-fsos-still-fall-short-on.html
Posted by: Consul-At-Arms | 14 August 2006 at 04:57 PM
I recall not so long ago reading about somebody whose candidacy for the Foreign Service was terminated because she had mild asthma. The woman was fluent in Japanese. I can't help but think that the FSO recruitment process does not always have its priorities straight.
I would also add that I have experience dealing with FSOs who are trying to learn languages. All too often it seems to me that they don't take the effort very seriously. They do it because they have to and not because they want. I'm unsure what can be done about that, but I think the tendency to try scare FSOs about their career being on the line is counter-productive.
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