Most public schools in the US offer Spanish, French and German. If you are really lucky, there might be a section of Latin offered. IMO, the only one of these that needs to be taught is Spanish. French as an international language has been far surpassed by English, and there is next to zero reason anyone should need German for anything, including the Germans. We desperately need to be educating our students in languages that will matter during their lifetimes. Where are the high school classes in Mandarin Chinese and Arabic? How about Hindi?
In high school (in my experience), the value of foreign language instruction is in learning about how languages are put together more than in learning how to speak, read, or understand another language. I don’t think it really matters what the language is.
I’d love for schools to provide education in Arabic, Hindi or Chinese (or basically any language you care to mention) but jsgoddess does have a point. Learning another language - no matter which language - does give you an understanding of the differences between cultures and peoples that you can get in no other way, in my opinion. The realization that two languages aren’t simply coded mirrors of each other but that there are actual differences in mindset and thought is an important one.
I always thought that the supposed value of learning a second language was learning the unavoidable, if sometimes minimal amount about the target culture which came through learning the language.
The thing about learning how languages are put together (that is, linguistic typology) is doable, but language courses in general and high school language courses in particular tend to fail spectacularly at teaching typology to any appreciable degree. In north america, this is because most language programs (and textbooks) attempt to teach their target language based on Latin typology. This can work if you’re looking at a language reasonably close to Latin in the family tree (the romance languages tend to work the smoothest), but as you leave eastern Europe you start running into languages that, while systematic in their structure, completely defy this system.
As such I think that it’s valuable to get thinking about languages and how they’re put together (which language courses do encourage you to consider), and you can never go wrong with exposure to another culture’s world view.
I don’t know what the phrase “language typology” means, so we may be talking at cross-purposes.
What I meant, essentially, was that people can learn what their native language is doing when they learn how other languages do the same thing. Most native English speakers don’t know why they say things in specific ways. They just learned it that way and it’s what sounds right. If you study a foreign language at all, you learn more about your native language’s patterns and rules.
First, of course French or German are worthwhile to learn for their own sake. I´d wager that probably about half of the courses a high school student takes will never be “used” in real life directly by most students, whereas any foreign language wery well might be.
Second, learning how to learn any language, even just to overcome the tendency we have to assume that all languages work like our mother tongue, is valuable to pave the way for the day that the student learns whichever foreign language that they discover, in later life, it will really be helpful them to speak (in their job, or travels, or love life, or whatever).
Third, as John McWhorter explains in his books, over time and across the globe, it´s *unusual * for someone to grow up speaking only one language. Most residents of Africa, Asia, and in much of Latin America and Europe, the norm is to grow up speaking a more local language in the home, a more national language in many situations, and, often, a third, probably European-derived language in other situations. The typical U.S. child, speaking only English, is actually *atypical * in the bigger picture. So, anything to counter the U.S. tendency and get with the rest of the worlds program cant be a bad thing.
My justification for French is that it’s the language of our nearest neighbor and closest friend: Quebec. Aside from that, French is very widely spoken throughout the world, by virtue of the fact that France had enormous colonies: much of Africa, Indochina, bits of the Americas and the Middle East, etc. Plus, because of the intimate association between Britain and France over the years, there’s been a lot of cross-fertilization of the two languages. Within English literature taken as a whole, you’ll see more of French than any other foreign language, I’d guess – even Latin (though don’t ask me to prove it).
German, on the other hand…
But much of this is driven by the supply of teachers available. That said, I’d be suprised if teaching German were a growth industry. In the future, I think you’ll see some more useful languages being taught: Hindi, Chinese, Arabic.
Well when people talk about a “language’s typology” all they mean is “the structure of the language, as classified by its structural features”. These features can be really obvious, like word order - Subject-Object-Verb versus Verb-Subject-Object - or extremely subtle, such as the acoustic devices used to indicate stress. (Not all languages are stressed, but many of those which are differ in the way they indicate that a vowel or sonorant is stressed; some languages prefer to acoustically indicate stress by increasing the length of the stressed vowel, others prefer increasing the pitch.)
So what I was trying to get at with that whole bit was the fact that the picture formal English grammar taught in school tends to paint isn’t too accurate, and since many language courses, regardless of quality, tend to base their explainations of the language’s structure on prescriptivist English grammar, students run the risk of learning misconceptions as fact. So while you learn a crudload of awesome stuff from language courses, and I’m of the opinion that the more you take in K-12, the better, I was just trying to weigh in on the point that learning a language doesn’t necessarily teach you how languages in general work. But it helps.
Oh, and just for the record, K-6 language programs tend to be really awful. In general they tend to structure curriculum in a similiar way as the high school courses do, and the problem with this curriculum is that it models how adults best learn a language; kids learn it in a fundamentally different fashion, so sometimes I wish that teachers could get the time, funding, and access to enough interested experts and political leeway to jumpstart the system into doing something that made sense for little kids.
French and German have a lot of influence or at least relation to English. If you understand those two languages you will understand English far better.
France and Germany are also probably the two most influential nations of the philosophy of the modern era that spawned the US and our principles. If you want to read those philosophers in their own tongue you need to speak those languages.
And as Alphaboi pointed out, it’s a lot easier to find French and German speaking teachers than Arabic and Mandarin.
I agree with a lot of what you say, though for the record I’m more in favor of Spanish than French considering the large immigrant population that speaks Spanish as a primary or secondary language. I’m not sure if Hindi is going to be a popular candidate owing to the high rate of English fluency in India, and at least in the US I’m worried that the Arabic language, as a highly visible component of middle east culture, will suffer from the same negative backlash that German, formerly a primary language of the academy, suffered during WWI-WWII. It may be useful, and is certainly used by a significant demographic, but it’ll be hard to popularize in a high school. I mean, come on. If teaching darwin in school can raise the type of ruckus it has in the recent past, I’d be scared of how many people would possibly be offended by the teaching the Arabic language on a large scale across public schools in the US. (Not that I’m against it, mind you! Arabic’s an awesome language that more people should learn. ^^)
And yea, Chinese is… ehh. If you’re in business, Mandarin going to get lots of press for 7-15 years, and my guess is that it will stay extremely useful for at least 20 years or more. In the academy, however, my guess is that depending on your subject Japanese and Dutch are both going to prove to be quite useful.
For limited definitions of “understand,” I agree entirely. Knowledge of English’s major contributor languages is extremely useful in deciphering some of the seemingly illogical patterns of a language, and it helps figuring out the etymology of various terms. For other stuff though, I don’t know… and it’s not really my concern. What I was inarticulately trying to note earlier was just the idea that knowledge of what constitutes formal grammar in public English programs doesn’t give you insight into the language: it gives you insight into what a certain, originally quite exclusive social class thought the language should look like. After all, as has been established oodles of times elsewhere there is no one standard English language so much as there are a bunch of dialects which are pretty much mutually intelligible.
No problem! Please feel free to ask or PM if you have other questions, criticisms or the like. I’m a graduate student in linguistics, so if my explanations tend to sometimes come off as nit-picky it’s just because I’m trying to be really precise about what I say, not 'cause I’m trying to be a jerk by arguing semantics.
And yea. As a scientific discipline linguistics utilizes a so-called “descriptivist” approach to language: we can’t say what should or shouldn’t be said, so we’re restricted to standing on the sidelines and making empirical observations about what we see. As I recall, however, formal english grammar (that is, what you learn in north american high schools) is basically a creation of the English upper class: the idea that the dialect spoken in the upper echelons is “correct” english, and that dialectal variations observed in the lower classes were due to poor schooling, low intelligence, poor breeding, or a host of other ridiculous reasons allowed the elite another device with which to stratify the existing classes.
Anyway, the way languages are structured isn’t nearly as clear cut as some would have you believe. I’m not a syntactician but at this point I’m unsure of what a language is, what a sentence is, or what a word is. I’m not even sure the latter two exist. We have extremely (and in my opinion, often unnecessarily) complicated theories and theoretical frameworks in place to account for variation across world languages (and we still haven’t identified every language in the world. We probably never will, in my opinion, owing to the fact that language is always changing).
So there’s all this empirical rigor surrounding the discipline, which leads to our being sure about absolutely nothing. Then you get the prescriptivists, most of whom don’t intend ill, spouting things which are quite reasonable from the prescriptivist grammar point of view and utter BS from a real world stance. Yet formal grammar has a good reputation, and a lot of it intuitively makes sense once you’ve had it pounded into you… so you can see why many linguists wince when prescriptivism gets introduced in conversations.
I guess this is just one more of those things we here in NorCal do better than you folks down in SoCal. Japanese and Mandarin are pretty commonly taught in schools here, although I don’t know about Arabic (I doubt it’s very common).
I wouldn’t worry much about Hindi. English is one of the official languages of India, and it is widely spoken there.
As for what we should do, I don’t know what to say other than… offer more language classes. With school systems being so fragmented and localized in the US, I don’t see how a national policy could gain any traction.
If you are offering Japanese and Mandarin, you sure are!
Foreign languages are so very important to a child’s education, and we are saddling them with either irrelevant languages or allowing them to slip through with none at all. The price we pay for being such a large country with few neighbors.
There are cities in and around Si Valley where you’re more apt to hear Chinese spoken on the street than English. Maybe that’s a bit of an exageration, but there is a big demand for Mandarin classes around here. I know of one school district that offers a Mandarin immersion program!
Yeah, and we need to teach them starting in grammar school, not high school. We generally start teaching 2nd languages in the US at the precise point when a kids brain is beginning to lose it’s ability to easily learn them. Stupid us!
I agree, but picking and choosing languages based on “relevance” is a doomed prospect. Much can be had in learning any language, and while Spanish would obviously bring the added benefit of being able to speak to a large local population, I don’t believe this is a reason to disqualify French, German, Latin, or any of a host of languages offered in school.
I-E language instruction offer a few distinct advantage for native English speakers. First there’s a wealth of vocabulary cognates, so study of these languages illuminates (from Latin lumen via French lumiere) English vocabulary. Second you don’t have to learn a whole new alphabet/symbology, which saves students an immense amount of time in learning the language itself. These are advantages Mandarin, Arabic, and Hindi can’t offer (at least to any similar extent).
Don’t get me wrong; if I were king I’d require everyone to study a foreign language. However, when we start talking about which languages are “relevant”, that’s where you lose me. Obviously public schools can’t offer to teachevery language ever spoken, but IMO its best to make those decisions based on available resources, the ability of the instruction to accomplish expected goals, and general interest, rather than guessing about the supposed importance of certain languages to future global economic/political scenarios.
