It is pretty well known that before age ten or so, kids are a sponge for foreign languages. They can learn them quickly and easily and for most people this represents their only chance to speak fluently with a perfect accent. After that, the pathways in your brain start getting a little more set and you lose your ability to make and distinguish sounds you aren’t used to. After this point, you will probably never speak like a native.
And yet, in America, 99% of public schools don’t even start foreign language instruction until high school (around age 14). Most schools require two years of foreign language. The instruction is usually not very rigorous- colleges usually consider a year of high school foreign language instruction to be equivalent to one semester
Why do we teach foreign languages at the absolute worst time to do so? Why even bother? Few adult Americans remember the foreign language instruction they got in high school. Can anyone defend this practice or explain why we havn’t sought to change it?
Nobody really cares that much about foreign languages in this country. Which is a shame, but really, you probably won’t need one. Most everyone speaks English in the country and 50% of the countries bordering us do, as well.
Starting foreign language instruction in elementary school would cost money. You would have to purchase materials and hire instructors who knew the language not just in middle and high schools, but also for elementary schools. Most schools don’t have enough funds to teach the required stuff now, much less pay for additional required stuff.
Because we haven’t needed to. The Dutch have to in order to function in their society; we don’t, so we haven’t.
That said, I know many people who have put their elementary-age children into Spanish immersion classes, which are California’s way of getting around the ban on bilingual education. They are great as far as I can tell; the classes are 50/50 Anglo/Latino children, and instruction is 50/50 Spanish/English. The kids wind up fluent in both languages and friendly with each other.
It’s a sort of chicken-and-egg situation, too. For example (and this is a broad generalization which varies by region), usually the most sought after teachers at the high school level are foreign language teachers. This is because people qualified to teach a language, in addition to meeting general teaching requirements (masters degree, certification, etc) are apparently pretty rare, and often schools will have to go to great lengths to keep their language department staffed. Adding foreign language requirements at the elementary level would just transfer this hiring problem to those schools, since instead of just looking for qualified elementary teachers (who meet the standards and education requirements), now they also have to be qualified to teach a language. This means more money in the budget to attract more talent, or facing shortages of teachers that meet the requirements, or maybe staffing additional language teachers outside of the existing positions. With school budgets being voted down in large numbers recently, obviously this isn’t going to be popular.
Of course, we’re most likely in this situation to begin with because of the overall lack of emphasis of foreign languages in basic education, so the question is how do we get out of this hole that we’ve dug.
This is 100% correct, I think. America is surrounded by a spanish speaking country that is mostly seen as a vacation-destination, a mostly english-speaking country, and 2 oceans. There’s not the exposure or the impetus to learn other languages.
Personally, I think it’s a shame. I think it would be great if every school district taught foreign languages from the get-go, BUT as other Dopers have pointed out, you need qualified speakers from K-12. That’s a tall order in most districts.
Well yeah, it would be a pain. But we already go through all of that in high school- when it’s a big pain for almost no benefit. We spend two years of time, money, supplies and teachers teaching high schoolers something in a way that virtually guarentees that it will have no effect.
While I think it is important for our citizens to leads a foreign language (it broadens horizens, leads to an better understanding of your own language, and is infinitely valuable even if you never bceome fluent…my crappy forgotten French lessons still help me when I’m confronted with text in Spanish or Italian), I really think it’s pretty pointless in High School. We could be using that time doing important stuff like having a current events class, and a personal finance class.
I know schools can change. We’ve switched reading methods several times. We all know about the “new math.” We’ve found a way to incorporate all manner of tests and teaching-to-those-tests. In California, at least, you can’t throw a stone without hitting a Spanish speaker- you could use a rotating teacher and it wouldn’t have to be a full-time thing. Heck, it’s not like all high school language teachers are all that qualfied. Few are native speakers and sometimes they are just one chapter ahead of the students in the book. At least if it was done in elementry school it would do some good.
Learning a foreign language is way down on the priority list for most Americans. People have already posted the reasons for this. It’s a shame, from an intellectual standpoint, but it’s really hard to force something that isn’t practical on people.
I think you’ll find that quite a few private schools DO start foreign language instruction at an early age. As for the public schools… well, I don’t think the curriculum has changed much since I was in school (and that was a LONG time ago).
Additionally, if you did teach a foreign language early, you’d have to continue instruction all thru Middle School and High School, othewise it’d be a waste of time-- the kids would just forget it. Other than Spanish, you have to really go out of your way to put yourself in situations where you need to speak another language in this country. That’s not true, of course, for the large number of Americans who speak a non-English language at home. I don’t recall the number of such households, but it’s high, and increasing (not decreasing as most people probably think).
It’s considered a luxury, like art and music, so unless parents and teachers are vigorous in their support and efforts to get programs funded, it doesn’t happen. There are regional variations, too. We’re in San Diego, and my kids’ elementary school has spanish instruction at least once a week, as well as programs on Mexican culture, etc., starting in kindergarten. However, we are in a wealthy school district and our school can afford to pay for a special instructor to go around to the various classrooms. I think more formal instruction starts in middle school, but in my day (midwestern school, 1970s) it was optional. I don’t know if it is required here.
The public schools in my town have foreign language immersion programs starting in Kindergarten. My 3 year old daughter will most likely be in 100% French immersion when she starts Kindergarten in a year and a half.
It is out there in some places.
I agree that there is little practical need to learn a foreign language in the U.S. I go to Europe fairly frequently and I can only speak English these days although I spoke Spanish fairly well at one time. They speak English most places in western Europe too. If that person doesn’t just direct your inquiry to the person beside him or better yet, just ask the American couple two tables away. I have never had a single problem even when I spend hours walking aound by myself.
Most people will wonder why they need to spend years learning Spanish just to speak to the gardner.
Well, color me surprised. After looking at state requirements, it seems that very few actually require foreign language (although I’m sure plenty of schools do- every high school I have experience with requires foreign language as a graduation requirement and most colleges have it as an entrance requirement.)
When I was in school (in the early 70s) very few non-college bound kids took a foreign language, and even those who did usually took the bare minimum-- 2 years. That’s about enough to remember how to say “Me llamo Juan” a few years later. I took 5 years, and continued it in college, but that was very unusual. I think there were about 8 students in my 5th year Spanish class (in a school of ~2,000).
Whoa, if learning a foreign language was a requirement to graduating high school I’d still be there! I could learn words and simple phrases but if I had to speak more than 1-2 simple sentences / decode them from a speaker (as we were wont to do on tests), especially in front of other pople, then my brain would freak out. I was so jealous of the people who passed it like it was nothing.
I agree with cher3, though:
Then again, I never liked art and music either…I was like odd like that. But yeah, I think our kids should catch up on learning math and science (and, in some cases, actual English…) than worrying about other languages.
Except that, it turns out that learning is usually a complex thing. Studying music helps in math, learning other languages helps in English, and so on. Leaving out things like art, music, and languages impoverishes the rest of education in the long term.
I took a few years of French and German and found that it helped my English tremendously (especially in spelling).
Taking languages in high school is more of an intellectual exercise than anything else. Certainly unlikely you will ever be fluent or have a good accent.
But I aways considered algebra and plane geometry also to be more of an intellectual exercise than anything else anyway. How many of you non-math majors have ever really used algebra or plane geometry in your daily lives?
Come to think of it-------all high school is —is essentially just a mental exercise. Something to keep the kiddies off the streets and their minds somewhat busy.
You learned all the essentials of being “literate” in elementary school. ---------learned to read, learned to add, subtract, multiply and divide. ------or, at least, you were supposed to— (and with calculators today so common-----who really needs to learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide these days?)
I have actually forgotten how to subtract anymore without a calculator. At the age of 10 I easily understood how to “carry”. At the age of 62, I am “iffy” at best and many times wrong when subtracting.-------which can cause serious problems with my checkbook.
Oh well, ------calculators are small, cheap and handy.
Funny, I took 5 years of French and found it completely trashed my spelling. Seems that everything that ends in -ent in English ends in -ant in French and vice versa, and words that have/don’t have double letters are reversed too. I also lost the ability to roll my Rs. On the other hand, I can now passably read every other Romance language too which seems like a fair trade-off. Purely intellectual exercise, maybe, but I’d still recommend it
I had csharpmajor’s experience: German killed my spelling. Bad German!
Anyway, one issue is simply the question of “What language do we teach?”
French? A traditional choice but not very useful anymore? Spanish? But why, since it’s also not really needed in today’s world? German? Not actually much call for it anymore, since teir economy is on the rocks? Japanese? Nifty, but not many teachers? Chinese? Pain in the butt. Russian? They’re not going so hot, either.
And for most of those we probably couldn’t even get enough teachers, anyway.
Your average not-heading-to-college kid has a far less chance of ever using high level math/science than a foreign language. At least learning a foreign language is a job skill. At least around here being bilingual puts you at a huge advantage in the job market and most jobs give a bonus to bilingual people. Another advantage is that if you learn one language you often gain skills in all the related languages. I can’t remember any of the French I took in high school, but I can read any romance language enough to comprehend it and speak enough Spanish to hold a conversation.
Your guy’s high schools did offer foreign languages, right? My bare-bones high school had a French/Spanish/German department. I always thought we were missing out by not having a Latin or Japanese department. Is that not the norm for other high schools?
You had German? I wish we’d had German; that would have been cool. (I speak good Danish, and studied German with success in college, but high-school Spanish was very difficult on account of the Danish thing, and to this day I speak Spanish with a Danish accent, which let me tell you is pretty horrifying.)
We had a little French available, mostly Spanish. My sister (now 18, I’m 32) went to a much better school and studied Japanese, but I only know a couple of people who were able to take Latin, and they went to really good schools. Will it gladden your heart to learn that my 5-yo will be studying Latin this spring?
