The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

masterful at securing cost sharing from other sources, which is often in-kind support provided by local host insti- tutions. RELOs do not operate in isolation. They plan their work in close cooperation with the public affairs officers and cultural affairs officers in their countries of responsi- bility, using most of the same tools and resources for edu- cational programming that public diplomacy generalists use, such as international visitors, Fulbright scholars, sum- mer institutes, and small grants. They also have other resources offered by ECA/A/L. The English Language Specialist program sends approximately 90 American pro- fessors fromU.S. universities and colleges abroad for two- to six-week visits every year to lead workshops, attend con- ferences, or participate in other special events co-spon- sored by embassies. The English Language Fellow pro- gram places approximately 100 American teachers in local host institutions on 10-month grants to teach English, develop curricula and materials, and do teacher training. ECA/A/L publishes a quarterly journal on foreign lan- guage teaching, English Teaching Forum , which celebrat- ed its 40th anniversary in 2002. Embassies in 95 countries distribute 65,000 copies of each issue. The office also offers close to 100 teacher reference books and student textbooks in English teaching and American studies through the department’s Regional Printing Center in Manila, as well as electronic publications on the ECA/A/L home page. Supporting Mission Goals Perhaps the best way to reveal the scope of Regional English Language Officers work is to cite a few of their past and present accomplishments. Implicit in each of these RELO success stories is the fundamental premise of all our ECA work: face-to-face professional and personal contact between Americans and people from other coun- tries contributes immeasurably to improving understand- ing of our shared values and tolerance of our differences. Also, by targeting education from primary school to uni- versity, they can reach a broad local audience during the most formative years of life in terms of shaping attitudes and beliefs. Here are some highlights. • Teachers from Islamic schools in Thailand and Indonesia work with American colleagues to improve their skills in language teaching. During the current aca- demic year, English teachers from 18 private Islamic schools in southern Thailand attended a 10-week work- shop organized by the RELO in Bangkok and conducted by an English Language Fellow. This training is part of a Thai Ministry of Education initiative to improve private education in the south and adopt the standardized nonre- ligious curriculum. During the 2003-2004 academic year in Indonesia, in a collaborative project created by the RELO in Jakarta, seven English Language Fellows will teach in state Islamic institutes, where future madrasa teachers receive their pedagogical training. • The Summer English Teaching Institute in South Africa was one of the few opportunities for professional interaction among teachers of different races and ethnic backgrounds during the final years of apartheid. Still going strong after 17 years, SETI has grown with the changing political-cultural landscape of southern Africa and remains a major annual project for the RELO in Pretoria. During a six-week residential program at a uni- versity in the U.S., between 25 and 30 teachers and teacher trainers have focused on topics such as civic edu- cation, HIV/AIDS prevention, and entrepreneurship, while getting to know each other as professional col- leagues and fellow human beings. • Professional exchanges between Turkish and Greek participants, sponsored by the American embassies in Ankara and Athens, began some years ago with seminars that were conceived and organized by the RELO in Ankara for English teachers from these two historically antagonistic countries. Promoting conflict resolution was the underlying goal, and English language teaching pro- vided an ideal content area because it was considered politically neutral by the participants. In the first exchange, Greek teachers were invited to a seminar in Turkey that was taught by American academics. F O C U S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 29 William Ancker is a Regional English Language Officer currently assigned to ECA/A/L as the editor of English Teaching Forum . He has served in Central America and Central Asia. He thanks his RELO colleagues, in partic- ular, Tom Miller (Ankara), George Scholz (Pretoria), George Wilcox (Bahrain), Kay Davis (Dakar), John Turek (Amman), Patricia Sullivan (Kiev), Robert Lindsey (Cairo), Lisa Harshbarger (Tashkent), Ruth Petzold (Moscow), and Michael Rudder (San Jose), who con- tributed to this article. For more information about the work of RELOs and the Office of English Language Programs, visit ECA/A/L online at http://exchanges. state.gov/education/engteaching/.