We Can’t Squander Language Skills

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI put out urgent appeals for citizens fluent in Arabic and Farsi. The fact that the United States’ domestic intelligence agency lacked the language resources to understand the intelligence it was gathering probably came as a surprise to most Americans but not to language experts. The FBI’s language problem is part of a larger national problem that is rooted in the U.S. education system. But a solution lies within our schools too--with our immigrant students.

A recent study of language and U.S. security by the University of Maryland’s National Foreign Language Center corroborates what language experts have been saying for years: The U.S. government faces a critical shortage of foreign language expertise, the result of what the study calls “a sea change” in national language needs over the past 15 years. Former Illinois Sen. Paul Simon has pointed out that today “some 80 federal agencies need proficiency in nearly 100 foreign languages to deal with threats from terrorism, narcotrafficking and communicable diseases,” and to advance U.S. economic and diplomatic interests.

The U.S. education system views foreign language study the way it views music appreciation: nice but not necessary. For the most part, our schools teach foreign languages the way they always have--a few hours a week for a few years--and for the most part we get the same results: Very few of our college graduates can function in another language. What American students need and rarely get is continuous instruction throughout their education, from elementary school through college, preferably with periods of intensive study.

Our foreign language deficiency is particularly acute in the uncommonly taught languages of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. According to Kirk Belnap, a professor of Arabic at Brigham Young University, no more than 200 non-Arab Americans in the entire country have a professional-level proficiency in Arabic, the fifth most widely spoken language in the world. Pashto, the language of the Pashtun, the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan, is not studied in American colleges.

However, the language expertise that the U.S. needs already exists, or potentially exists, in our schools, in a population of students whose language abilities we have ignored. Immigration has made this nation more diverse linguistically than it has ever been. One in five children enters school speaking a language other than English, including many of the languages of Asia and the Middle East.

But if past trends hold, these children will lose most of their native language in the process of learning English.

Our schools generally ignore the languages that immigrant children bring with them. Giving up one’s native language often is seen as a natural, even desirable, consequence of assimilation.

By adolescence, children speak haltingly a language they once spoke with ease. Most lose or never develop the ability to read and write in their native language.

In a strange twist, some end up in high school or college foreign language classes trying to relearn the language they once felt impelled to give up.

Their language loss is our collective loss. Immigrant children can speak other languages with a native speaker’s fluency and an insider’s grasp of the culture. And many know languages that English speakers aren’t inclined to study.

With support from their schools, parents and communities, immigrant children can maintain and deepen their knowledge of their home language at the same time they are learning English.

In light of our national needs, let’s rethink the ways that we educate immigrant students. If we viewed the languages they know as resources to be developed rather than as obstacles to be overcome, the students would acquire a highly valued skill and the nation would gain badly needed expertise.