Yes, it is a changing world when native born Americans cannot read, spell, write, and speak their own language very well after 12 years of school. And it’s not changing for the better.

I don’t know much about the teaching and learning of languages, but I have just a bit of personal experience to make me wary of what others say. When I was an undergraduate in the early 60′s I was not into languages. However I did know that there was something wonderful and new in the teaching of languages. Apparently it had been recently discovered that imersion is the way to go in learning a language, and that the young pick up languages very easily. Therefore it was conventional wisdom that in a few years all elementary schools would teaching at least one foreign language to all students just as a matter of course. Now fast forward about 35 years, to the late 90′s. I was driving home and changing stations on the radio when I happened on an interview with an enthusiastic elementary teacher. She had discovered that for language learning, immersion is the way to go, and the young pick up languages very easily. Therefore she was eagerly describing the wonderful things she was doing teaching a foreign language in her elementary school. There seemed to be no doubt that in her mind she was a pioneer. She was doing something new, implementing a new idea that had a lot of promise, and was based on unassailable logic. If I recall right she also was of the opinion that other schools would eventually see the light and do what she was doing.

Educational fads come and go, but in the 1960′s I did not think teaching a foreign language to the young by immersion was just a fad. I thought it was genuine progress. Why, then, was the idea seen as shiny and new thirty-five years later? What happened to the logic and promise that seemed so compelling in the 60′s?

How are foreign languages taught in the schools today? I know there are immersion programs. We read about them in the papers now and then. But are they the rule? I took some college german classes in the late 60′s and 70′s, three semesters as I recall, and they were pretty much the standard text based courses that I expected. My youngest daughter took high school German in 1996-2000. She had a good teacher and really enjoyed the experience. Indeed she considered majoring in German in college. So far as I could tell it was taught by the usual, traditional, conventional text-based instruction. She did her written homework faithfully. She studied for tests. That’s not what I would have expected from all the idealistic rhetoric about language instruction that I heard in the 60′s.

There’s no doubt that there is something to this idea of a “window of opportunity” that closes down at some age. But I wonder if that window applies mainly to the ability to get the pronunciation right. I wonder if the old text-based instruction has remained the rule because it’s the most efficient way for most people to make real progress in a language. “Mastery” of a second language, I think, is rare, by any method. But genuine progress is not terribly difficult. It just comes best by doing your homework.

My wife is a high school teacher in our exurban county school district. The school, enrollment just over 1000, will begin their IB program next year. Students have exactly two second language options: Spanish and Chinese. While our county has a massive legal and illegal Hispanic immigrant population, her school is overwhelmingly white and predominantly middle to upper class… and yet the only language besides Spanish offered is Chinese. It’s a changing world.

If ONLY during my HS days we were able to study Russian, Chinese, or Arabic. I would have been all over that back in the day!!!

“BOTH girls have studied the language since the seventh grade and can now converse and understand native Chinese speakers.”

Yes, but at what level? And are they going to remember this when they are adults?

“On a recent class trip to Chinatown, they bargained over prices of store goods and ordered meals in Chinese.”

I could do that in Dutch very quickly (and badly) after moving to Holland with no previous training. This isn’t that hard. I’d be really impressed if they could read the Chinese on the menu. No peeking at the English!

I know I sound very critical, but I laud anyone who does anything in a foreign language. When I was at a Chinese restaurant in Holland, it made me mad to see an American tourist making REALLY LOUD demands in English to the waitress: “I WANT ____!!”. Yeah, like the ‘tude will help. Gee, at least ask, “Excuse me, do you speak English?” or something. I wish more Americans were like those girls. Good for them, and I say that without any sarcasm.

“To me, the broader goal really has to do with sensitizing students to cultures that are different than their own. Learning the language is important, but understanding how language and culture and politics and personal behavior all interact is also very important.”

I agree, but I don’t think a foreign language class is necessarily the best means to achieve this end. Someone who only takes French or even Mandarin is not really “multicultural” in any meaningful sense. The (ex-)Francophone world is big – spanning from Quebec to Vietnam – but it’s not *the* world. I enjoyed my German classes in school, but they weren’t as eye-opening as my mandatory classes in Middle Eastern and Asian history.

NYC Educator wrote,

“We offer Chinese in our school but only to kids who already speak it.

How dumb is that?”

Very. In my experience, heritage language learners have little motivation beyond a little sentiment and a hope for an easy A. No, they’re not all like that, but it is a really sad sight to see kids regard “their” language with apathy. Nearly every expert I know in East Asian languages is either a native speaker or someone who learned the language as an adult, not at home. Given the unfortunate odds, I’d prefer a motivated non-heritage learner. When I studied Korean 19 years ago, the non-heritage learners were far more motivated. The star of my high school’s Mandarin program was non-Chinese. But the reality is that heritage learners are numerous and have to be the backbone of some language programs (French can get along just fine without children of French-speaking parents).

Also, I bet the kids at your school probably don’t speak standard Mandarin at home. They may be speakers of, say, Cantonese, which is to Mandarin what Spanish is to French. Related, but not the same thing, and not a “dialect” in the normal sense of the word. I took Mandarin with a Cantonese-speaking friend and he had a hard time. Language similarity can even backfire, especially when combined with apathy. I’ve seen Lao-speaking kids try to get away with speaking Lao-like Thai (or should that be the other way around?) in Thai class.

Margo,

“I believe that what contributes to the difficulty of learning a European language in school is that we introduce it too late, and teach primarily by the book–rather than incorporating large amounts of spoken language.”

Fortunately, the book-driven approach to language learning is long obsolete in the US, so I don’t think this criticism is relevant anymore. My Russian professor emphasized speaking to the point where he made us call him up on the phone at home for extra practice. Now that’s dedication! Even my Sanskrit teacher believed in oral Sanskrit, not just silent words on paper. And when I taught Japanese, my philosophy was like my Russian professor’s (minus the phone calls): make the students talk as much as possible in the foreign language in class. Every classroom minute was precious and couldn’t be wasted on reading English explanations that were already in the textbook. (Cf. the discussion-driven AP US history course I mentioned in another comment.)

Book-driven language learning is still very much alive in Asia, and the attempts to remedy that are half-hearted, but that’s another rant.

“Most other countries begin a second language much younger than we do–and make a distinction between verbal fluency and literacy.”

I’m not sure what you mean by “make a distinction.” I think it’s pretty unusual to acquire either skill in isolation. There are programs that teach Japanese entirely in romanization without introducing the Japanese writing system, but they are rare. I took a speaking-centered Khmer class in which the alphabet was optional (!) but none of my classes in 16 other languages worked like that.

“Many countries expect their students to be trilingual.”

It’s hard to draw comparisons between the US and other countries in terms of language learning because of the unique status of English. In many countries, it’s common to

- speak one language at home
- learn the national standard language
- learn a European language (often of a former European colonizer)

To state the difference in a blunt manner, people in these countries early in life learn that *nobody cares about their language* (other than the people in their region, of course). A Taiwanese monolingual would be helpless outside Taiwan. (It doesn’t help that Taiwanese has no standard written form.) So such a person learns Mandarin (the standard language of Taiwan which isn’t native to Taiwan) and tries to learn English.

Someone in the Third World would be even more motivated to learn a European language, since there are no physics books in his native language or even in his country’s standard language, whereas there are such books in, say, Mandarin. In Cambodia after liberation from France, a (the?) medical school was still running in French. I presume nobody was translating French medical books into Khmer. I don’t even know if Khmer medical terminology even exists.

Nels,

“It wasn’t that long ago that an affluent, educated adult was expected to at a minimum know English, French, Italian, German, and French.”

It depends on what “know” means. My guess is that a century ago, elites had solid knowledge of two or three languages and a reading / basic speaking knowledge of a couple of others, not balanced multilingualism. I deal with polyglots every day, and people who really can pull off a linguistic balancing act are rare.

Andromeda,

“Well, firstly, the earlier you start with a language, the easier it is. ”

Yes. And the better the accent, as you’ve noted.

But the challenge is to build on that early start. What happens after all the self-congratulation (“woo hoo! Chinese kindergarten classes!”) ends? That’s the real issue.

“Second, from what I’m told, given the amount of characters you have to learn to become literate in Chinese, you’d better start it early or you’re doomed.”

It’s possible for motivated adults to master thousands of characters within a few years. Character acquisition can be slow with brute force memory methods, but if one understands how characters are phonetically (yes, phonetically) structured, one has a huge advantage.

And to end on a positive note, I agree with everything Brendan said!

It’s funny – when I was in grad school, there were Chinese teachers working on Chinese as a foreign language degrees. It was OK for them to teach university students, but they couldn’t teach in NY schools! I think the Chinese teachers in NY would be better off with CFL degrees than generic education degrees.