The inauguration of our 44th president promises to bring many changes to the U.S., and there’s reason to hope that better foreign language education will be among them. The statistics on foreign language proficiency in the U.S. are downright dismal; in 2005, the National Association for Bilingual Education reported that half of the European Union’s citizens considered themselves fluent in at least two languages, and nearly 80% of EU high school and college students felt that they could hold a conversation in at least one foreign language. In some EU countries where multiple languages are in common use (for example in Luxembourg and Switzerland), upwards of 90% of citizens consider themselves conversant in at least two languages. By contrast, a mere 9% of Americans considered themselves fluent in a second language as of 2005.
As reported in the Salon.com article One nation, just not speaking English, Obama was asked to comment on high school dropout prevention as well as bilingual education. Obama first decried the misguided English only movement and went on to observe that “Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English…you should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.”
Without injecting too many of my own political views in here, I have to note that this is the first time I’ve ever seen a politician take the “why can’t everyone just speak English?” issue to the next level. Obama’s underlying question of how our own, largely monolingual children will measure up in an increasingly multicultural and multilingual world, is a huge one. Obama clearly has a number of tasks on his plate right now, but once he resolves the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, establishes a national health care system, fixes Medicare and Social Security and stops global climate change, here’s hoping that better foreign language education will get its moment in the spotlight!
Prejudices against foreign languages in the US or the perception that they have no use are far too widespread in the US. Even at Occidental College, where Mr. Obama began his studies, I was criticized by professors in chemistry numerous times for “wasting” my time on foreign languages because at conferences “they all speak English anyway”. (One of the critics shut up after it was revealed that he had wasted months of research time because he hadn’t read the relevant literature in German. My first translation requests for scientific literature came after that 🙂
In my experience, children are also sometimes persecuted for speaking other languages at home. Bullies in a rural school in Oregon did not like the fact that my stepdaughters also spoke Dutch and German at home, and their attentions finally drove us to home schooling at one point.
My hope is that Mr. Obama’s presidency will nudge attitudes toward a greater acceptance of diversity and of education, and that more people will realize how knowledge of other cultures and languages enriches us. If not, I suppose this concept could be cheapened and recast as a “national security” issue with the need to know what those godless foreigners are saying about “us”. That does seem to be more important to many people.
It is so important that children learn languages other than their own. We live in a multicultural world and as you said in Europe most children can speak at least one other language, even if it’s only holding a basic conversation.
There are problems here in the UK too… Most kids have access to French, German or Spanish at school but after the age of 16 they don’t have to continue developing that language skill. This usually means that by the time they reach adulthood they have forgotten most of the foreign language skills they learnt at school. I believe children should start learning another language from their first year at school. At least this would give them half a chance of retaining those language skills into adulthood.
I hope President Obama makes some changes and pushes the importance of language skills. Language is a beautiful thing; learning languages can promote cultural understanding and will help us develop a better, more understanding and tolerant society in the future.
If Americans attempted to learn another language perhaps they would be more understanding of those who have migrated to their country and are learning English as a second language. It seems such a shame that some states in America are trying to get rid of translation and make English compulsory. For a country that has developed its world renowned status on migrants it seems very intolerant. What happened to being ‘the land of the free’!?….
What I don’t understand is why the issues related to the “English-only” movement and those of the advantages of learning more foreign languages by the English-speaking population are bundled together. The supporters of “English-only” insist that immigrants learn English as the language of the land they have chosen for their immigration. I happen to be a Russian immigrant, I came to an English-speaking country and I learned English. I did not expect that the mere fact of my arrival to the USA would somehow oblige the Americans to learn Russian. It’s unlikely that the supporters of “English-only” oppose the learning of foreign languages by English-speaking Americans. They seem to insist that foreigners who intend to settle here learn English. Why has this quite reasonable requirement suddenly been countered with such a strong opposition? If it’s useful for an American to learn an extra foreign language or two, why is it not for someone for whom English is equally foreign? Immigrants are not brought here by force, so to learn the language of the country one chooses to eventually become a citizen of is not an unreasonable burden. I also believe that examples such as Luxembourg and Switzerland have little to do with the subject: those countries have a finite list of official languages. Also, those are the languages of their native communities. Using this analogy, I would probably be more understanding if the activist energy would have been aimed at accommodating the languages of Native American peoples. I would also understand if the “English-only” movement had been confronted by an “English-Spanish” movement calling to follow the example set by Canada – to make the languages of the two largest communities official, at least that would be a finite list of languages an ordinary citizen (not a language professional) is expected to be familiar with. The longer the “English-only” movement is not countered with a reasonable alternative concept, the stronger it is going to become and rightfully so as the greater is going to be the number of people living in this society and being unable to communicate with it, and, therefore, unable to eventually become part of this society and, hopefully, fulfill their dreams and achieve their aspirations.
Although people may not oppose American children learning English, they may not support or encourage it either. The benefits to learning ANY new language are huge!