StudyAbroad.com’s The Globe

Utica Community Schools was just awarded a $1.5 million federal grant to establish a Mandarin Chinese language program, according to the Macomb Daily.

Says Utica Superintendent Christine Johns, “We are thrilled with the aspect of providing instruction in Mandarin Chinese to our students.”

As the terrifically named Macomb staff writer Frank DeFrank writes in the article, “With more than 1 billion speakers, Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language on Earth. U.S. educators have increasingly focused on Mandarin as a foreign language offering because of China’s meteoric rise as an emerging world economic power.”

We here at StudyAbroad.com couldn’t agree more, which is why we made Mandarin our Destination of the Month for August.  The accompanying StudyAbroad.com article details the many benefits of learning Mandarin Chinese as a U.S. student.

Utica is one of eight districts in the entire country to receive such a grant, and the article states that school officials expect roughly 650 students to have studied Mandarin Chinese by the time the grant expires five years from now.

What do you think of this grant, and the growing popularity of the official language of the official home of the 2008 Summer Olympics?