Impact of Language Immersion Programs on Foreign Language

Communicating with other nations in their native language is an important and necessary aspect of a successful United States' foreign policy. Critical to this success is the ability of military personnel to communicate clearly when in contact with foreign nationals, whether in peace-time or war. The Air Force has made great strides in the past 10 years to improve its foreign language capability, particularly through its application of the language immersion program. The LASI program has significantly improved the foreign language capability of the Air Force, specifically those with previous language scores in the mid-tier range. The main goal of this thesis was to quantify that increase in language capability, thus allowing those rsponsible for the Air Force language capability to make appropriate decisions regarding the future direction of the Air Force's Language program. An additional aspect of this thesis is to investigate possible correlations between language capabilities and personality dimensions; therefore, as part of this study, Air Force officers (linguists) took a survey to obtain language scores, measure personality dimensions and efforts to retain their language.