Diplomatic Opportunities for Chinese-speaking Americans

Greetings, all.

I’ve been (mostly) lurking around these forums for the past nine months or so, and I’ve enjoyed the informative content and positive tone. Many thanks to the mods and the contributors! (And apologies in advance if I’ve posted this to the wrong sub-forum; it was not immediately apparent which would be most appropriate.)

For the past five years or so, I have worked as a Foreign Service Officer (FSO) with the US Department of State. As far as government jobs go, it’s a pretty good deal; plenty of opportunities to live and work overseas, study foreign languages, and contribute to the public service. Of particular interest to those frequenting these forums, though, is the fact that the State Department is making a concerted effort to recruit US citizens with Chinese-language proficiency.

There are three basic steps to getting a job with the foreign service. First, there is a written exam (the Foreign Service Written Examination – FSWE), which is usually given once a year. Those who pass the written exam are invited to the Foreign Service Oral Assessment (FSOA), a day-long assessment held in various cities throughout the United States. Passers of the FSOA then process through security, medical, and suitability clearances. Based on one’s score from the FSOA, applicants are offered positions in a new foreign service officer training class. Speaking Chinese with at least a level 2 proficiency (on the Interagency Language Roundtable – ILR – scale) will give a significant boost to the scores of those who have passed the FSOA, making it more likely that they will ultimately go to work for the foreign service. Applicants who receive a boost due to their Chinese language ability are normally expected to serve at least one of their first two tours on the Mainland, in Taiwan, or in Hong Kong.

There are also excellent opportunities for people interested in learning Mandarin Chinese. I am currently halfway through the State Department’s two-year Mandarin course. My first year has been spent at the Department’s training center in Arlington, Virginia, where I have Chinese classes five hours each day (and one hour of language lab). The classes are all taught by native Chinese speakers, and maximum class size is one teacher and three or four students. This Fall my family and I will move to Beijing, where each day I will have six hours of one-on-one tutorial in the language. This is done through an arrangement with a well-known (and well-regarded) private language school that has been discussed before on these forums. Following my second year of Mandarin training, my family and I will transfer to one of the US consulates for my follow-on assignment. Before I started my studies last September, I had no background in Chinese, so even a desire to go to China can work to one’s advantage in the foreign service.

The great thing about State Department language training is that you don’t have any other responsibilities to worry about. Your "job" is literally to learn the language. You continue to receive a full salary, earn promotions, and accrue vacation and retirement credits. When overseas, your housing is paid for, and US diplomatic housing in China these days is outstanding. Overall, it is a wonderful opportunity, and I feel very fortunate to have it, especially since my interest in China developed only after completing my university studies (thus making this type of full-time language study otherwise quite difficult).

Anyway, I just wanted to make everyone aware of this opportunity. Plenty of relevant information can be found here. There is also a Yahoo! group for people looking for information about the FSWE.

Cheers,

FSO

It sounds like you are living a language learner's dream! Do you know what type of work you will do once your training is finished?

Man, that's pretty intense stuff. Do they expect you to have shown any language-learning proficiency / interest prior to starting?

Which school in Beijing is it, by the way. I never noticed any suited diplomats mixing with the Koreans and BLCU refugees at Diqiucun . . .

Interesting post, thanks.

Do you know what type of work you will do once your training is finished?

I will serve as a Political Affairs officer (traditional diplomatic reporting and representation work).

Do they expect you to have shown any language-learning proficiency / interest prior to starting?

Every new FSO takes the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT), but I don't know of any case where someone has been prevented from studying a specific language due to thier score. No prior proficiency or interest is required, though most people don't bid for jobs requiring languages they don't want to learn (language training is tied to specific assignments; many of my colleagues are only studying Chinese for one year, or even thirty weeks in some cases, due to the proficiency levels needed for their particular jobs).

Which school in Beijing is it, by the way. I never noticed any suited diplomats mixing with the Koreans and BLCU refugees at Diqiucun . . .

I will be going through CET, though I think there is at least one other school the embassy uses. We study at an off-site location, so there isn't any interaction with the usual cadre of language students. And the dress code for language study is very relaxed - we don't wear suits to class!

Cheers,

FSO

I know this post is an honest effort by someone actually *in* the State Department to reach out to serious language learners. So let me reciprocate by honestly saying that the approach your institution is taking here is completely wrong.

The solution to language scarcity is not putting tremendous resources into one-on-one instruction. From your description of the language training program and what I have heard elsewhere, I would imagine that the costs being borne for the two years of language training described above would be somewhere around $200,000 USD. Multiply this by the number of people throwing away two years of their lives because there is now an institutional effort to promote mandarin to people, many of whom will never be able to speak it.

Your department clearly has more money than it knows how to spend. And the pity is that if the State Department was serious about promoting Chinese language education it could change the market overnight. Release open source instructional texts and recordings. Buy out the ABC dictionary and place it in the public domain. Fund Wenlin and make the software freely available or contribute to any of the various collaborative open source tools, or resources everyone else without a security clearance uses.

But the State Department is not doing this. Possibly because the people you work with do not know they exist. More likely because people are locked into institutional funding practices and are set on keeping educational resources in-house and unavailable to the public. To make this point as specific as possible, why is the Chinese content on langnet not publicly accessible?

You guys are running a private instructional fiefdom. So don't complain about the scarcity of Chinese language speakers outside of it. Just hope that the people you are training are provided with enough time and resources to learn the language, end up with more than middling Chinese, and that no-one looks too closely at the bill when everything comes due.

Hmmm.. As it stands I am in the supposed top 7% (statistic I read about people who speak two languages other than English, one of them difficult (Arabic, Chinese, Russian), and have not been asked to join the foreign service because I am less than adequately educated in US history. I understand that this is entirely important to serving in the foreign service, but am curious to know whether there will be any attempts to reconcile this. Perhaps they could offer courses in history to some of us...

That, and another question. A professor of mine knew someone involved with designing the fs exam, and his advice was to read Newsweek cover to cover. Do you think this still applies?

trevelyan posed a question I've had for a while, namely why aren't the US govt. Chinese language schools more involved in the push for Chinese Education in the civilian population?

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showpost.php?p=53778&postcount=3

That post has a link to a story about kids in Chicago Public schools taking Chinese, supposedly the largest public school program of its kind. You might think that the various language schools run by the US govt, with decades of experience teaching Chinese as a 2nd language to English speakers would have a huge interest in this program.

http://www.nsba.org/site/doc_sbn_issue.asp?TRACKID=&VID=55&CID=682&DID=37191

Much of this expansion was made possible by an annual donation of 3,000 Mandarin textbooks from the Chinese Ministry of Education. That agency has identified the Chicago school district as having the best Chinese language program in the United States.

Now for a forced analogy: Imagine the 1960's and the push for Calculus and AP physics in US schools as a result of Sputnik. Now imagine that the texts had to come from Russia because, well, perhaps as trevelyan said, the really effective math and physics teaching materials in the US required a security clearance.

To be fair, there does seem to be a federal program to get money to schools for Chinese.

A request for proposals drew a flood of interest, and in September the University of Oregon and Portland Public Schools were notified that they had won a $700,000-a-year grant from the U.S. Defense Department to immerse some 1,500 students from kindergarten through college in Mandarin Chinese.

that runs to $466 per student per year. So what's the class size, how much are these teachers in Portland paid? What materials, geared for native speakers or provided by China Ministry of Ed? Does a special focussed grant program at $466 per student per year in a (handful of? ) city sound like a response to a strategic national security issue?

and now going off topic ...

I mean, maybe some of the language school owners can chime it, say their are 20 students per class. This is immersion, so say the teacher has the kids all day. Does that mean the school is working with about $9000 per year to pay a Chinese immersion teacher and buy materials? In Portland? This seems like it can't work. Even if it's 1/2 immersion which gives you about 20,000 per class-day. Perhaps they are using funds saved from laying off other teachers who aren't needed since kids are transfering to the immersion program. So then $9000 is a premium they can pay to scarce Chinese teachers. Obviously I don't serve on my local school board, otherwise I'd know how this works in practice.

Do these numbers look right?

How am I meant to act smug after my time spent in China learning Mandarin, if every school kid is taught the language and therefore speaks it better than me?

No need to flame. FSO says that he or she has only been a foreign service officer for five years and obviously doesn't set the policy on language training expenditures. I see his or her intent as just to give some info that some of us might find interesting and not to speak on behalf of the US State Dept.

@gato

I don't think anyone flamed FSO per se. Certainly some strong viewpoints were expressed. Perhaps some could not pass up the opportunity to express these viewpoints to someone who has disclosed his affiliation with US govt Chinese language training, no matter how short lived.

Question 1 on the survey "Is the Foreign Service right for you?"

http://www.foreignservicecareers.com/careers/rightforme/index.html

is "Would I enjoy..."

1. Being a representative of the United States to businesses and governments worldwide?"

Presumably FSO can read heartfelt suggestions for US govt agencies from a taxpayer or two without being put out.

Presumably FSO can read heartfelt suggestions for US govt agencies from a taxpayer or two without being put out.

Heh. We "pinstriped cookie-pushers" have thicker hides than our stereotype would suggest. . . .

And I'm a taxpayer too, by the way!

A professor of mine knew someone involved with designing the fs exam, and his advice was to read Newsweek cover to cover. Do you think this still applies?

I would recommend The Economist myself, though any news source that provides a broad perspective on current affairs couldn't hurt. The official website provides this (rediculously long) list of recommended reading.

I have always appreciated trevelyan's comments on this forum, so I'm more than willing to respond to some of the concerns that were brought up.

From your description of the language training program and what I have heard elsewhere, I would imagine that the costs being borne for the two years of language training described above would be somewhere around $200,000 USD. Multiply this by the number of people throwing away two years of their lives because there is now an institutional effort to promote mandarin to people, many of whom will never be able to speak it.

I personally don't think that learing Chinese is "throwing away" two years of my life, and there are probably not just a few others on these boards who would agree with me. The State Department's program is quite good at getting students to the relatively high level of fluency necessary for diplomatic work; the minimum ILR score for graduates of the two-year course is a 3/3 (speaking/reading), and a significant number of students finish at the 3+/3+ level. Does this mean that graduates will be writing poetry or parsing complex philosophical texts? No. Will they be prepared to promote US foreign policy in such fora as public speeches or radio and television interviews? Yes, they can (and do). People come out of the program very much knowing the language at a professional level.

Your department clearly has more money than it knows how to spend.

I think I can safely say that State has never been accused of that before! For most of the 1990s the Department didn't even have enough money to hire above attrition. This is because American foreign policy has been done largely "on the cheap" over the past few decades. Personally, I think we are paying for it now, but there are people who would disagree with me.

Perhaps you were thinking of the Department of Defense. . . .

You guys are running a private instructional fiefdom. So don't complain about the scarcity of Chinese language speakers outside of it. Just hope that the people you are training are provided with enough time and resources to learn the language, end up with more than middling Chinese, and that no-one looks too closely at the bill when everything comes due.

Hmm. I'm not sure I can justify the cost of State Department language training, since it isn't possible to prove a negative. It's hard to put a price tag on having the right person, with the right training and experience, in the right place, at the right time, to advance US interests. If government-funded language skills help to defuse an international incident (especially with such an important country as the PRC), then what is that worth? I really don't have an answer. But with $90,000,000,000 supplemental defense spending bills becoming a routine phenomenon in Washington these days, I'm not too worried about any raised eyebrows when it comes to State's portion of the Foreign Affairs budget (which amounts to less than one percent of America's peacetime federal expenditures).

Cheers,

FSO

Hmm, I, personally, would be very interested in details about the methodologies and theories used to teach the language.

It wasn't a flame gato. Just pointing out that funding decisions are really irrational. If the state department trained one less officer in first year Chinese, they could spend the $100,000 saved sending 30 college graduates to Harbin for the summer. Or fund the development of basic pedagogical materials and make them freely available to students in perpetuity.

Like kudra, I am continually baffled when I read about Chinese language education being an American priority, because this is transparently not the case. The only real funding for pedagogical development is happening through the Department of Education, and the grants provided tend to (1) focus on the K12 system and very rudimental levels of Chinese instruction, (2) be used to create proprietary and closed language learning materials, (3) create American versions of things like the HSK, or (4) earmark funds for covering personnel costs at institutions. Chengo is a pretty nice program for basic instruction, but it should be free of charge considering the amount of public funding thrown at it on both sides of the Pacific.

So this might be a rant, but I don't think it is a flame. FSO has nothing to apologize for because this isn't an attack on him or anyone else studying Chinese through the State Department. My point is simply that there is an insane amount of funding being thrown away in the name of Chinese language promotion and the vast, vast majority of language students are not benefiting from it in any way shape or form. Pointing this out is fair game in a thread about institutional opportunities seeking to address the scarcity of CSL students.

And who knows, maybe if FSO becomes fluent he will find himself in a position to change this sort of thing?

I agree your points for the most part, trevelyan. Was just afraid that the comments above were heated enough to scare away someone who could otherwise be an interesting contributor here. But it looks like FSO has thick enough skin to be a diplomat. That being the case, I'll note that FSO has not really address your complaint that the State Dept should be language education more broadly. The Defense Dept could be funding general language education, too, but its traditional priorities have been in hardware. Anyway, people who work in State should be smarter, right? The current model seems to be find the right person with the right personal qualities to be a diplomat and then train that person in foreign languages and other job skills. This model suggests that the State Dept doesn't consider language skills to be among the most important skills. Otherwise, funding foreign language scholarships would be a great idea because it would both enlarge and improve the quality of the applicant pool . And funding PlecoDict and Wenlin scholarships would be great idea, too! In any case, FSO, maybe you can suggest this to your boss.

Well I guess I can shed some light into the State Departments language training, as I just completed three semesters at CET Harbin, and have seen over 40 diplomats pass through their course, and have spoken with them and their teachers about their course material.

When they come to Harbin, the U.S diplomats come for no more than 10 days when the normal CET program is on fall, summer, or winter break between semesters. Other countries such as Canada has chosen to directly enroll their officers into our program, two of my classmates last semester were diplomats.

For their week course, there are the obvious small group classes (2-3 students, 1 professor) and they have spoken Chinese, chinese literature, etc, but this is all based on interest. The majority of them are studying Chinese that is directly related to their job. If they are a U.S commerce officer, they will be pared with a Economics or trade professional in Harbin that has experience teaching to foreigners and for a week they will go over a number of specialized topics. I have heard of everything from Space Weapons to Agricultural reform.

One time, my professor who has also teaching an american ambassador at the same time, showed me their syllabus, he was studying Chinese provincial economic reforms, and had some other lessons like, "negotiation tactics" , "business meal etiquitte" but my favorite was "Space Weapons Development" right inbetween "the spring festival" and "the chinese car industry" hmmmm what are we really studying here. I brought up why she thought he was studying this and she said to me, "well they are all spies aren't they?, maybe not directly working for the CIA, but they are collecting open source intelligence, there's no difference from my perspective."

(On an interesting side-note, a number of our Chinese roommates who study Aerospace engineering, because most of it is related to the Defense Industry here, have to sign confidentiality agreements with their department that they promise not to talk about it with US americans. kind of funny that all of their textbooks from "torpedo guidance" to "netro-centric nuclear warfare" I can pick-up at the University bookstore.

Now the cool thing about this, is that everything the Diplomats do language training wise, is exactly the same as CET Harbin, we get the same education diplomats do. Ok I know I am plugging CET Harbin, but it really is a great program.

I know the CET Beijing program does more training than Harbin because of its Beijing location.

The Defense Dept could be funding general language education, too...

They are.

FSO,

I was in CET Beijing about 20 years ago and have been continuously studying Chinese ever since 1993.

Diplomatic opportunities for Chinese-speaking Americans are there ONLY if you can pass the written test offered just once a year (and it's all about English and history, nothing about Chinese) and the oral interviews (if you ever get to that point, again, nothing involving Chinese). As for the language proficiency test, note that it's a telephone interview. I'm hearing impaired so I have no hope of passing that kind of test.

By the way I took and failed the written test twice before getting entangled in a lengthy divorce that finally got finalized, so I haven't been on that track the last five years.

Meng Lelan,

I am not trying to stick up for the State Dept (or any other US Govt. Agency) when it comes to foreign language. I won't get into my personal opinions on the matter either. I certainly agree that the phone interview for the language test is not a good idea. However, I think that one has to understand the mission of the State Dept.

To put it simply, to be an FSO is to be a mouth for the State Dept. in foreign countries and serve the US interests abroad. So while someone might have a mightly command of Chinese and know a lot about Chinese culture, they might have very little knowledge about the US and thus they would not be of interest to the State Dept. I suspect that is why they test on US Foreign policy and US history and government. As for the English requirement almost all governmental jobs require strong English skills. Besides, from what I have seen, I think natives in each country handle a majority of the foreign language work requiring high level language skill. My Chinese teacher worked as an interpreter and translator in the US Embassy in Beijing for 5 years before she moved to the US to teach German and Chinese.

While the State Dept. and other government agencies really preach about need for language ability, I do not think it is a priority or something the agencies take too seriously. If you really want to do serious work with Chinese language, I think the private sector might offer more opportunities.

Novemberfog,

1. You are correct that the State Department needs people with strong English skills and an understanding of US history. I think the written exam is on target in that respect.

2. That's what I've wondered - do the US citizens who get into the State Department really use Chinese 24/7 and on the job? I've known for a long time that the US embassy in Beijing employs the locals to do translation work and news report write-ups so your observations are pretty much what I was thinking.

3. I don't think I want to enter the private sector for many reasons that I am not going to go into here, but I do want to teach Chinese in a high school or middle school so now I am looking into being certified. That might satisfy my need to do serious Chinese language work. I hope it's the right thing to do.

Lelan

You are probably right, that would look good on a resume. Some time in the State Dept. would deinfately qualify you for doing any sort of civil service and government job like teaching in public schools. Perhaps you should look into doing your teaching license as well?