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The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the STARTALK language programs on the internationalization of higher education in the United States. The study focused on the 11 STARTALK language programs offered to high school students in the summers of 2013, 2014, and 2015 on various university campuses in the U.S. Such programs enabled some of the participating high school students to earn college credits which they could later transfer to their respective Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Thus, the study attempted to look at the impact of the STARTALK language program from two perspectives: how they accelerated internationalization in HEIs by bolstering their high school enrollees’ intercultural competence, and how they interacted with key higher education variables such as access, affordability, and time to degree. Intercultural competence theoretical framework was used to facilitate the understanding of how the teaching of foreign languages relates to internationalization. The study was based on the STARTALK language program’s dataset that was obtained from the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) at the University of Maryland. The data was quantitatively analyzed to examine the impact those languages had on the ongoing internationalization of higher education in the U.S. Descriptive analyses were run in the SPSS using selected variables from the 2013, 2014, and 2015 STARTALK program’s post-program survey data. The variables used for the analysis included the participants’ grade levels, gender, country of birth, state of residence, languages in which they were enrolled, and their beliefs regarding the study of foreign languages. The second stage of analysis entailed running one-way ANOVA to examine if the differences in students’ beliefs regarding the study of foreign languages based on selected variables were statistically significant. Selected variables used for the one-way ANOVA were the participants’ grade level, gender, languages in which they were enrolled and, those languages’ difficulty level. The Ohio University’s guaranteed tuition model for 2015-2016 academic year and the undergraduate catalog were used to determine the impact of the STARTALK language on access, affordability, and time to degree for a student who might transfer their foreign language credits from the STARTALK language program to Ohio University. |
