115 AZ language educators, from elementary through university levels, came together to learn strategies that get students talking and using the new language they are learning. They all belong to the AZ Language Association, a group committed to preparing our future AZ multilingual workforce. These educators represented teaching AZ students Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, German, Japanese, ESL and English. Advocacy was also a part of the meeting which shared the irony behind the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017) report that cites AZ as having among the lowest enrollment in foreign language classes at only 8% of the state’s students while The New American Economy study (2017) shared a 16% increase in bilingual online job postings from 2010 to 2015.

Graph source: Burning Glass Technologies, Labor Insight, Data pulled on April 13, 2016 http://www.leadwithlanguages.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/NAE_Bilingual_V6.pdf