The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2012

J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 2 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 35 ers go through a weeklong course on training tradecraft. SZ: Are you seeing any spikes in enrollment in language courses? RW: I think language training across the board has grown a lot since 2005. Some of that is due to very robust hiring. Newly hired officers are getting more weeks of training than be- fore. The big five are French, Spanish, Arabic, Chi- nese and Russian. There’s been a serious increase in the number of Chinese-language students. SZ: Are you still doing any language training in shifts? RW: Some, but that was eased considerably when we added new facilities two years ago. Part of the use of shifts was simply because we did not have enough classrooms. The new addition has 135,000 square feet of space, and since a large per- centage of that went to the lan- guage school, shifts aren’t as need- ed as before. SZ: Do Eligible Family Members and Members of Household get training? RW: Even in some of FSI’s most in-demand courses, eligible family members can enroll on a space-available basis; many of them take languages. We also have more than 30 fantastic courses that are de- signed and run through the Transition Center specifically for EFMs, including same-sex domestic partners. Sec- retary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that expansion in June 2009. SZ: Have you implemented any changes in area stud- ies? RW: We still teach area studies in two primary ways. F OCUS “There are very high numbers of people saying: ‘I’m putting into practice what I’ve learned [at FSI].’”