Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program | 875 followers on LinkedIn. An immersive summer opportunity to study languages and cultures essential to America's engagement with the world. | The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program partners with universities and nonprofits around the globe to provide cohorts of U.S. students an opportunity to study the language and culture in a country/location where the target language is commonly spoken. The CLS Program offers instruction in a dozen critical languages. The CLS Program, through its CLS Spark initiative, provides beginner-level virtual instruction for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian for competitively selected U.S. undergraduate students whose home campuses do not offer these languages.