No se habla español: America’s problem with foreign language education

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At the end of this academic year, I will (hopefully) receive a fancy piece of paper certifying that Occidental College has tested and confirmed my ability to speak Spanish. If you’re reading this and thinking that sounds like a colossal waste of time and money, you’re not the first.

As it turns out, this assumption is incorrect. Students who study languages are at a major advantage — interest in hiring foreign language majors has risen in recent years, and college graduates who can speak a second language earn more money on average than college graduates who cannot. Studies cite an advantage for bilingual people in everything from delaying the onset of dementia to improving cognitive abilities like selective attention.

Considering all these benefits, why is it that only about a quarter of Americans can speak a language besides English — and only a third who claim to speak that language “very well” learned to do so in a classroom? Simple. The way that our educational system approaches the teaching of second languages is broken.

In the United States, only about 15 percent of public elementary schools offer instruction in a language other than English. Scientifically speaking, the critical period for learning a new language ends around age 10. By the time Americans typically begin learning a second language in middle or high school, they are at a cognitive disadvantage.

This doesn’t mean that learning a new language after the fifth grade is impossible. It’s just much, much harder. On average, less than one-fifth of all American students are enrolled in foreign languages courses each year, and only 8 percent of high schoolers reach a high enough skill level to take an Advanced Placement (AP) language test. In contrast, most European students begin learning a second language in primary school, typically between the ages of six and nine.

During my semester studying in Spain, I taught English at a local middle school. My students, ages 10 to 14, already spoke conversational English. Sure, they weren’t fluent, and their pronunciation often left much to be desired — that’ll happen when you learn a language with almost double the number of phonemes as your native tongue. While my students in Spain asked me questions about irregular past-tense verb conjugations and extended metaphors, American middle school students continue to struggle to learn the basics of the Spanish present tense. You might look at this disparity and wonder how American students will ever catch up.

Spoiler alert: they won’t.

While it is likely that English will remain the lingua franca for international communication, a lot is lost in Americans’ dismissal of the value in learning to speak other languages. In 2013, over 60 million people living in the United States spoke a language besides English in their homes; that’s one-fifth of the population. In California, 45 percent of residents speak a language besides English at home.

While life in this country is already more difficult for non-English speakers, recent events only augment the problem: Travel bans, the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the proposal of a merit-based immigration system that favors English-speaking applicants. Our president wants to build a wall between us and Mexico. Even though the United States has no officially declared national language, the xenophobic rhetoric of our current politics sends a clear message: “in America, we speak English. Get with the program or get out of the country.” Thus, language becomes an expression of nationalism, and we lose our desire to engage with other cultures.

Here at Occidental, 29 percent of the Class of 2020 comes from a home where English is not the dominant language. That’s almost 150 sophomore students for whom English is either their second language or who have grown up speaking English in conjunction with another language. This fall, according to course counts, only 165 students of any grade level are enrolled in a 300-level or higher language course.

We need more college students in this country to commit themselves to becoming proficient in at least one language besides English. When else will we have this much time to dedicate to learning for learning’s sake? Only by taking the time now, while we still can, will Occidental students fulfill our potential in “an increasingly complex, interdependent and pluralistic world.”

Now, I don’t think that forcing everyone in the country into bilingualism is the solution to this widening linguistic divide — it’s simply not feasible. However, implementing a more ambitious foreign language curriculum in our educational system would move us in the right direction.

Harper Hayes is a senior Spanish and Psychology major. She can be reached at hayesh@oxy.edu

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2 COMMENTS

  1. That’s amazing that your students were asking such complex questions! It’s certainly something that I don’t remember hearing when I was in foreign language classrooms in middle and high school. Having been abroad also, it’s incredible to see how much more value a foreign languages degree has elsewhere. Besides America’s “problem” in not having enough young foreign language students, I’d be really curious to know how foreign language instruction might differ in countries outside of the U.S.

  2. I recommend taking some time to do a little more research about the “critical period” hypothesis. The article you referred to as the “scientific” basis for your article is almost 30 years old. I’m sure that as a psychology major you’re aware that our understanding of how the brain works has developed significantly over that period of time. The “critical period” is highly controversial and while many accept that it’s difficult to master a language as a teen or adult, language acquisition can happen as efficiently or even more efficiently when teens and adults engage with comprehensible input for long periods of time. I’d recommend the article you can download on this page: https://tesolal.columbia.edu/article/the-critical-period-hypothesis/

    I also suggested researching your unsubstantiated claim that, “By the time Americans typically begin learning a second language in middle or high school, they are at a cognitive disadvantage.” Having taught children, teens, and adults in many contexts I can anecdotally say that I haven’t seen this to be the case. I actually appreciate the cognitive advantage in my adult learners (literacy, ability to understand context, focus/attention). Many of the disadvantages I see in my adult learners are not cognitive at all. Some of their problems are practical: they struggle to find time to work on their language learning. They also have emotional and social challenges that my younger students don’t have: they are more afraid of embarrassing themselves and making mistakes and they become frustrated with the inability to communicate at their normal adult level of discourse.

    We may find that there is some validity to the critical period, but I strongly doubt it will be defined as it was in the 1989 article you referenced. I wish you the best as you continue to learn about language acquisition and advocate for language learning.

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