UW-Madison receives grant for Central Asian Turkic languages

The U.S. Department of Education has awarded the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Language Institute $379,000 to support the Central Asian Interactive Listening Series (CAILS) project.

The project, funded for three years, is designed to rapidly develop the advanced-level skills of Americans in critical Turkic languages of Central Asia and surrounding regions.

“For many years, UW–Madison had the only major program in Kazak language,” says Uli Schamiloglu, director of the CAILS project and professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia. “Currently we are teaching Uzbek as our main language and are hoping to expand into cross-dialect training in Kazak, Uygur and other Turkic languages such as Turkmen.”

According to Schamiloglu, who also serves as chair of the Central Asian Studies Program and directs the Middle East Studies program of UW–Madison’s International Institute, only a handful of American universities offer these critical languages. He notes that Indiana University-Bloomington and the University of Washington-Seattle, as well as UW–Madison, have had graduate programs in the Turkic languages of Central Asia. Schamiloglu says there is interest in using distance education and online modes of instruction to make instruction in Central Asian languages more available nationwide.

As part of the project, CAILS will develop a series of 20 online lessons and instructional resources to promote advanced-level proficiency in Kazak and Uzbek. The project will provide cross-language training for individuals with intermediate-level proficiency in one Turkic language, making it possible for students to work toward advanced-level listening proficiency in Kazak or Uzbek without having to begin a four-skills language course from the first semester.

“The CAILS lessons are entertaining and provide a unique opportunity for students to practice listening to authentic language in its real cultural contexts,” says Talant Mawkanuli, CAILS associate director. Mawkanuli, a prominent Turkic linguist with extensive teaching and materials development experience, recently returned from a trip to Kazakhstan where he conducted videotaped interviews with prominent Kazak scholars, politicians and students on topics such as ethnicity, youth culture, migration, Kazak literary and intellectual traditions, education and gender inequality. Excerpts from these interviews will form the basis of the CAILS lessons.

For more information about the CAILS project, contact Schamiloglu at uschamil@wisc.edu or (608) 262-7141. For more information about the Language Institute, contact Sally Magnan at ssmagnan@wisc.edu or (608) 262-9741; or Dianna Murphy at diannamurphy@wisc.edu or (608) 262-1575.