Language Training
Written by Tom Marlowe
To meet that need, Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), Navy Special Operations Command (NAVSOC), and Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MARSOC) turn to language training companies like Shee Atiká Languages LLC of Fayetteville, N.C. Shee Atiká Languages provides roleplayers for warfighters engaged in training classes to prepare them for speaking to or dealing with people in foreign countries.
Shee Atiká Languages has a standing contract with USSOCOM, whereby they provide services as needed, Ron Haynes, Shee Atiká Languages general manager, told Special Operations Technology.
“They might say, ‘we need 50 roleplayers with authentic Afghanistan costumes, and we need them to speak Dari,’” Haynes explained. “We support the Advanced Special Operations Training Course here in local areas. In the way that runs, we provide roleplayers that are sometimes not qualified linguists and sometimes they are. They will give them scenarios to play out with the special forces students.”
Scenarios could include things like defending or taking a dam or interviewing medical personnel entering and exiting a denied area to ascertain the situation in that area, Haynes added. Training can occur at regularly scheduled intervals or on an ad hoc basis.
The Advanced Special Operations Training Exercises are regular events, but they do not necessarily occur every month.
“We just finished up one, then we have them for the next three months, and then we will get another task order for the next few,” Haynes described. “For the MARSOC exercises and some of the special forces group exercises, they will just call us up and ask if we can do it. Then we’ll go from there. They will give us the parameters of what they are looking for, and we’ll provide the people at the location.”
Military clients routinely give Shee Atiká Languages very high marks, which come as no surprise to Haynes. As much of the company’s headquarters staff is made up of retired military servicemembers, they are personally invested in providing the best service possible to their clients.
Shee Atiká Languages also provides linguistic support to the Joint Military Information Support Command, a unit of USSOCOM.
“We feel very strongly that adds a lot to our national defense and security. That consists of a lot of subject matter experts—regional and cultural guys—who provide advice to anyone that needs it, but oftentimes at a very high level, to explore how a particular culture will react to certain U.S. actions or perceived actions,” Haynes remarked.
IMMERSIVE LEARNING
Ken Fortune, vice president of LINC Government Services, served in U.S. Special Forces when he gained significant language proficiency traveling throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
“I noticed that my language skill increased much more rapidly when I was in the country rather than when I was sitting in a language classroom in Fort Bragg or Monterey, California,” Fortune told SOTECH. “However, that only could have been true because I had a baseline capability to springboard from.” So Fortune eventually joined Operational Support and Services (OSS), now a part of LINC Government Services based in Hopkinsville, Ky., to assist with the development of immersive language training. OSS views immersion as the placement of a student in a foreign country, living with a local family and commuting to work every day, in order to learn the local language. Classroom instruction is provided at the end of the day to provide structure and guidance in the language immersion.
“Our program has never been for beginners because they will drown. Generally speaking, you need to be at a 1/1 level, which consists of having a vocabulary of 750-1,000 words; forming basic sentences; understanding the past, present and future of the verb system; writing at about five words a minute and reading at about fifteen,” Fortune explained.
In the last 15 years, no other process available to the U.S. government statistically increases Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT) scores faster than the OSS program, Fortune asserted.
The DLPT tests are written by native linguists, who possess backgrounds of moving around in the foreign society in question. So the OSS program goes beyond language training to furnish a knowledge of how to move around inside the society, including dealing with checkpoints, using the local transportation and communication systems, and getting a meal. It is far beyond a language proficiency thing; they actually experience existing within the culture.
OSS has been offering the courses for 17 years now in 52 different countries to special forces, who refer to it as Live Environmental Training; the Air Force Attaché System, which calls it Language Area Studies Immersion; Civil Affairs personnel; psychological operations; foreign area officers; military intelligence; and the entire range of listeners, speakers and interrogators at government agencies.
The OSS program is available on about 25 different federal contracting vehicles, making the company the largest contractor to provide immersive services to the federal government. Prior to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the company was handling about 400 military students per month. That has dropped to about 225 per month in recent times due to the high operations tempo of warfighters who would benefit from the program. “Both the Air Force and the Army have embraced the concept of growing their linguists during the ascension phase,” Fortune noted. “So we have been working with ROTC and Academy cadets for about eight years now, attempting to increase their language proficiency to the 2/2 level on the DLTP score prior to them leaving their institution. Then the military can work on improving and maintaining that capability.”
VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS
Given that military forces are highly mobile, it’s not always possible for warfighters to participate in exercises with language professionals, however. In those cases, they turn to companies like Progressive Expert Consulting (PEC) Inc. of Syracuse, N.Y.
PEC replicates a physical classroom virtually, enabling students to engage instructors over a broadband connection from anywhere in the world, Mike Feng, director of systems integration, told SOTECH.
“We have given instructors and students the ability to have a language training class and to be able to talk face to face, to see each other’s facial expressions, and really to be in a small group up to six students per class wherever they can get access to a Windows PC, a Web cam, headphones and broadband Internet access,” Feng said.
The PEC system is not intended to operate over secure Department of Defense networks. So the company works around the security issues of distance learning by encouraging students to participate from home. Many active duty servicemembers as well as defense civilians already have broadband access at home, enabling them to participate in classes from remote locations.
“That allows us to permit soldiers, airmen and Marines to participate in a language class without going anywhere. So they don’t have to TDY to a base for four months. They can take it whenever they need to,” Feng commented. “This is also very good for Reservists as well. If you are a Reserve member, members of your unit could be anywhere. That’s the nature of the Reserves. So getting them to be able to access a language class without having to move them around is a very good thing.” PEC Inc. has been in business providing language training since 1987, but only recently shifted into providing its virtual classroom training around 2001.
SOFTWARE-BASED TRAINING
Warfighters training remotely also can turn to software-based solutions. For example, Rosetta Stone offers both Farsi and Pashto among its 31 available languages. Rosetta Stone supports special operations forces through Army and Marine Corps total forcewide contracts and provides a military-specific Arabic edition to all DoD online contracts. Along with these forcewide contracts, the company supports numerous commands within the Air Force and Navy.
Another company offering language training courses is Auralog Inc. of Phoenix, Ariz. The company’s Tell Me More language training solutions are popular with language training centers of the military services, Chris Brightwell, an Auralog military sales representative, told SOTECH. The company does a lot of work with the Naval Special Warfare Center and SEAL teams in San Diego. Auralog can tailor its software and services to fit with military programs, meeting their initial language acquisition requirements and maintenance and sustainment needs. The company’s software started as a stand-alone self-paced system but has grown to include linguistic support services.
“It started as a self-paced language training program,” Brightwell recalled. “Over the past three years, we have migrated to a services company, where we provide not only software but also tutors and instructors to help the learners progress to whatever particular level they need to be at—whether that is intermediate or advanced or expert speaker.
“We now have services wrapped around the software so they can be tracked and monitored. Somebody is following the students’ learning path and helping them to achieve different levels of language success,” he continued. “Not everybody needs to be completely fluent—maybe their job is to translate a few things here and there, or maybe they are an interrogator. They may not need as high a language level as someone else that is doing another job. Our programs are self-paced, but then they have levels of language training.”
Auralog is working on large contracts with the Army National Guard and the Coast Guard. It also is negotiating an enterprise license with the Air Force and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The company has been doing a lot of work at Camp Pendleton for the Marine Corps recently. The growing Marine Corps Language Program is generating a lot of demand for Arabic, French, German and Italian in its mobile language centers lately, Brightwell observed.
While the company does not yet offer Farsi and Pashto language training, it is developing programs to support the military’s demand for it. Auralog’s standard Arabic training program is its most popular among military customers, Brightwell said.
“We are taking the requests we have from our current clients and trying to provide them with what they need,” he added. “Even though we already have an Arabic program, Pashto becomes something people request because that’s the primary language they speak in Afghanistan and that’s where we are starting to gear up our forces.”
SPECIFIC PROGRAMS
Specific military commands may even include language-training services on their consolidated purchasing contracts. The Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI), for instance, awarded Alelo Inc. of Los Angeles a seat on its STRI Omnibus Contract (STOC) II on January 27.
The overall contract, valued at $17.5 billion over the next 10 years, includes 142 contractors for various services, prequalifying those companies to compete for simulation and training task orders. Alelo won seats in both the full and open category and the small business category of STOC II.
Alelo touts its capabilities in instructional design methodologies for language training in addition to technologies for language tutoring systems, game-based learning environments, and artificial intelligence for conversational learning. In the past, the Army has praised Alelo’s Tactical Language and Cultural Training System (TLTS), which offers targeted language training in Iraqi, Pashto, Dari and French.
“We are delighted to have this opportunity to serve the Army as one of its preferred training system vendors,” Dr. W. Lewis Johnson, Alelo’s president and chief scientist, said of STOC II. The contract award followed on the heels of demonstrations of new offerings from Alelo at the I/ITSEC show in Florida in December 2008. There, the Marine Corps program manager for Training Systems (PM TRASYS) demonstrated expanded editions of the Tactical Iraqi and Tactical French software, which now include more lessons and scenarios to train users to an intermediate level of language proficiency. Alelo also announced a new version of its Tactical Dari software.
In addition, Alelo introduced new Web-based courses for language and culture training, including courses in Chinese. The company announced the development of a Virtual Cultural Awareness Trainer focused on the region of the Horn of Africa—an area for which every company interviewed for this article noted increased U.S. military interest.
Finally, the company showcased the development of a first edition of a plug-in for Bohemia Interactive’s Virtual Battlespace 2. The plug-in software, called the Automated Language Training System, puts users in multi-player scenarios to test their language and culture skills. The first scenario developed by Alelo places trainees in a situation where they must speak to a sheik in Arabic to encourage his cooperation in providing information on local insurgents. ♦