An Investigation on Language Programs in US Higher Institutions—A Case Study on Chinese Language Programs

Abstract

Although there have been an increasing number of programs offered by universities in the United States (U.S.) in recent years, few published studies address the development of any in U.S. universities. Therefore, the current study aims to address important issues to the success of the language program and bridge the gap between the existing literature and language program development implementing statistical methods of ordinal logistic regression and factor analysis. Based on data collecting from foreign language programs in 201 different universities across the U.S., we developed a proportional odds model to examine the factors that foster or constrain the development of the program. The study can also be used as a predictive model on the perspective of starting a new language program in a university based on its features in different respects. An internal validation of our model was conducted using the cross-classification table.