2015 Far East LinguaFest: an adventure in any language

OKINAWA, Japan — More than 100 DoDEA Pacific high school students and instructors from Guam, Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea came together March 23-28 on Kadena Air Base for the 2015 Far East LinguaFest, a language immersion and cultural event.

The mission of Far East LinguaFest is to foster higher levels of learning through language immersion in a culturally-enriched environment. The week was filled with linguistically rich activities including music, dance, cooking, hands-on projects, history, and college and career readiness study trips to the prestigious Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.

“The vision for LinguaFest is a community of lifelong learners committed to the main theme ‘living and breathing target languages and cultures,’” said Loretta Eng, DoDEA Pacific’s world language instructional systems specialist. “The ten instructional language-immersion sessions and three study trips were relevant to what our students are learning in the classroom. This helped us develop and maintain the sub-theme for this year’s event: ‘21st Century World Travelers.’”

Each student and instructor went through a very competitive selection process to attend Far East LinguaFest.  Instructors wrote essays to indicate how they maintain communication in their target language, envision the theme of living and breathing world language through the various topics, and provide an interactive-immersed environment that allows their students to move beyond the typical classroom setting. Each student was required to provide two teacher recommendations and write an essay explaining why they should be selected to attend.