Wise Language Use

An editorial in the Orange County Opinion section (March 11) lauds the Irvine Unified School District for offering after-school foreign language classes to its students “as young as kindergarten age.”

In fact, that school district merely mirrors the kind of thinking that impedes education.

Rather than refine the educational approaches that we now use, particularly in language acquisition, we choose to set more short-term goals. This time, it’s “Spanish for the volunteers.”

Economics is the prime reason for learning any second language, which is why so many foreign students learn English and why so many non-speakers of English in this country languish in poverty.

I worked overseas long enough to know that English is the business language of the world. A person can make more money in English than in any other language. But it must be good English.

A language is a tool that is almost worthless, like any other tool, unless one uses it effectively. A person who blathers in English and who learns Spanish will blather in Spanish.

The Irvine Unified School District and other school districts should spend at least as much time refining English-language programs as they spend “exposing” students to other languages.

By “refining,” I mean that they should concentrate on teaching their students how to use English effectively. For example, students should be taught how to use English to construct and analyze arguments.

They should also be taught how to use English to construct meanings and to reason. But before that, they should be taught how to read critically.

A district might want to “expose” kindergarten children to foreign languages so that the children lose their anxieties and their biases about “which is the best language.” Fine.

But to suggest, as the Los Angeles Times suggests, that “foreign language courses should be offered in the lower grades as part of the regular school curriculum,” while saying nothing about the sad state of language acquisition in general, is thoughtless when one realizes two things: First, we have only so many hours in a school day. Second, we are not teaching English, which is the primary language of the country, so that students can use it as the tool to tune their machinery of thought.

DON K. PIERSTORFF

Costa Mesa