Research and Assessment
The American Councils Research Center (ARC) conducts and disseminates research on language learning and use in education and the workplace, language immersion, transformative learning, intercultural development, and national trends in world language education. ARC’s work supports educators, policymakers, and researchers advancing language learning in the U.S. and abroad.
ARC develops, identifies and monitors best practices in language immersion learning and teachers’ professional development, building on the accomplishments of American Councils programming in language assessment, advanced language acquisition, immersion learning, intercultural development and teacher training. The ARC team has produced nationally and internationally recognized scholarly articles, reports and other publications.
ARC has produced multiple large-scale empirical studies of second language acquisition by American students in the overseas immersion setting, the impact of dual language (DLI) on academic performance in US K-12 education, the development of comprehensive surveys of US K-12 foreign language enrollments, and policy-relevant research.
Meet the ARC Team
The ARC serves as an academically independent, research arm of American Councils.
Dr. Dan E. Davidson is Director of the Research Center at American Councils and Emeritus Professor of Russian and Second Language Acquisition and Myra T. Cooley Lecturer at Bryn Mawr College. He received the A.M. and Ph.D. in Slavic from Harvard and has taught previously at Harvard, Columbia, Amherst, Pennsylvania, and Maryland/College Park. Dr. Davidson is co-founder of the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR) and founding president of American Councils, a federally sponsored educational and professional exchange organization with a particular focus on the less commonly studied languages and cultures of the world.
Dr. Davidson's scholarship has largely defined the empirical study of overseas immersion in critical languages. His landmark longitudinal study of 1,881 U.S. learners of Russian on ACTR programs of 2, 4, and 9 months established that L2 gains scale with immersion duration, reaching ILR 2+, 3, and 3+) in the yearlong program, and a cross-linguistic study of 308 U.S. participants in Arabic, Chinese, and Russian immersion documented gains of 4.76–7.74 standard deviations above baseline across reading, listening, and speaking. Related work frames overseas immersion as a core driver of intercultural competence and maps heritage-learner pathways to near-native proficiency. He has testified frequently before US House and Senate Committees on the role of international education and the linguistic readiness of the federal workforce.
Equally central is his engagement in teacher preparation: he has overseen summer immersion institutes at Moscow and St. Petersburg State Universities and Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, co-authored the Russian in Stages / Live from Russia! textbook series, and supervised 37 Ph.D. dissertations. His co-edited volume Transformative Language Learning and Teaching (Cambridge, 2021) received the MLA Mildenberger Prize and the AATSEEL Best Volume on Pedagogy award. Dr. Davidson has chaired the College Board World Languages Academic Advisory Committee, served as president of the Joint National Committee for Languages, and was appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on Languages in 2015. He holds 5 honorary doctorates from universities in Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Russia, and is holder of the national service awards of AATSEEL, ACTR, ADFL/MLA, Alliance, JNCL, Language Flagship and NCLCTL. Dr. Davidson is currently completing a study of the post-2022 re-centering of the professional development of Russian teachers from Russia to Kazakhstan.
Dr. Richard D. Brecht is Professor Emeritus of Russian the University of Maryland, co-director of the American Councils Research Center, and co-founder and Chief Language Officer at JeenieTM. He holds the Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures (1972) from Harvard and, after appointments at Cornell and Harvard, joined Maryland in 1980, with concurrent visiting and adjunct professorships at Bryn Mawr (1981–2005) and NFLC/Johns Hopkins (1994–2000).
Co-authored with Davidson and Ginsberg, Brecht's "Predictors of Language Gain during Study Abroad" (1995) has helped to set the agenda for empirical research on second language learning in the overseas context. With A. Ronald Walton, his Policy Issues in Foreign Language and Study Abroad (1994) called for a national architecture built around the ‘Language Enterprise’ of clients and providers of language education: academe, business, government, indigenous and heritage communities, and overseas support. For example, recent publications have elaborated on the cost/benefits of language services for healthcare as essential to social justice in the United States.
That agenda has defined Dr. Brecht’s leadership. Affiliated with the NFLC from its founding, Brecht became its director in 1999 and in 2003 founded Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language, a DoD University-Affiliated Research Center, as Executive Director. As an academic entrepreneur he has helped found and build over a dozen organizations and national initiatives, including American Councils, CASL, NCOLCTL, NFLC, Project ICONS, and JeenieTM. Committed to applying research to teaching, he co-authored the Russian: Stage Two course and grammar commentaries and helped found the STARTALK–DLI Partnerships for high-proficiency pathways in U.S. language education. He has testified repeatedly before Congress and authored a principal briefing paper America's Languages: Challenges and Promise for the AAAS Commission on Language and its national publication of the same title. His latest monograph, The Human in the Machine: Technology, Grammar, Interpretation, and Language Education is in-press.
Dr. Maria D. Lekic served as the Academic Director of the Russian Overseas Flagship, American Councils and associate professor of Russian (ret.), University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Lekic is author or coauthor of several research studies concerned with the assessment of language and cultural proficiency at the advanced levels, principal designer of the Russian Overseas Flagship “Level 3 Curriculum,” and coauthor of several widely used textbooks of Russian, including the 2-vol. video-based Live from Russia! (Kendall/Hunt). She is a recipient of the A. S. Pushkin Medal for distinguished service to the study and teaching of Russian.
Dr. Robert Slater has been a national leader in creating innovative solutions to language issues across the nation. Formerly the Director of the National Security Education Program, Dr. Slater created and launched the Language Flagship effort, the National Language Service Corps, and numerous scholarship and fellowship programs that support the study of languages by US students from kindergarten through post-secondary education.
Nadra Garas is Director of Institutional Research and Chief of Survey Research at American Councils. She is the principal author of the K-16 National Foreign Language Enrollment Survey (2017) and coauthor of academic publications on survey design, research methods, case study and quantitative analysis. She conducts research on language learning and intercultural development; assessments, as well as survey design and survey research methods. She has coauthored articles on language acquisition and intercultural development; and survey methods. She is responsible for coordinating and conducting research, program evaluations, large scale data collection and research grants held by American Councils.
Learn More
Contact ARC