Dr Richard Brecht

Richard Brecht is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland and co-director of the American Councils Research Center at the American Councils for International Education, a think tank devoted to providing evidence for language policy and management decisions in education and the work place. Dr. Brecht has founded, built and led over a dozen academic organizations, including American Councils for International Education, the Center for Advanced Study of Language (a Department of Defense University Affiliated Research Center), the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages, and the National Foreign Language Center. Dr. Brecht has received numerous awards from national and international organizations in the language field.

Dr. Brecht's research interests focus on language policy, language learning in immersion environments, heritage communities, cognition and bilingualism, language and employment, and language and national security. He has authored and edited scholarly books, textbooks, manuals, articles and reviews on language policy, second language acquisition, and Slavic and Russian linguistics, including a briefing paper “America’s Languages: Challenges and Promise” for the recent language education commission of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.