Speaking Up for Languages

Re “A Language-Challenged U.S.,” editorial, Jan. 22: When was the last time you ran into someone who took high school classes in French, Spanish or German and could actually hold even a primitive conversation in that language? Likely, that was rare. If Mandarin, Korean or Arabic were taught the same way as those big three, we would not be much better off.

There is a vast difference between the teaching of a foreign language when the goal is conversational ability and when the goal is to pass written tests about the language. I even passed a graduate school course in French-to-English translation of technical materials (after three years of traditional high school French), but could speak not a word until I went to France and taught myself with the help of some French friends.

Internalizing a foreign language to the point of being able to hold an extended conversation is a wondrous experience, and it does take time -- witness our immigrants (illegal or not) attempting to learn English.

Harvey H. Liss

Irvine

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Although you’re right that most American college students who study foreign languages choose Spanish, French, German or Italian instead of the more “necessary” Asian and Middle Eastern languages, the real problem is in the elementary schools, where students should begin to study foreign languages.

Unfortunately, very few elementary schools offer foreign languages, considering them frills.

The exceptions are dual-language schools that teach all school subjects in two languages. Sadly, the number of these language schools in the U.S. is extremely small. The federal government does provide grants to set up dual-language schools, but it’s the local school districts that need to take the initiative and implement them.

Domenico Maceri

Instructor of Romance

Languages, Allan Hancock

College, Santa Maria

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The Times indicates that only 8% of California students take a foreign language before high school. However, you fail to mention that 41% of all California’s public school students speak a language other than English in the home.

Consequently, they are becoming or are already bilingual in their heritage language and English.

The United States clearly should be concerned about the lack of linguistic resources due to the low numbers of students who are studying a foreign language in our public schools.

However, it is shortsighted and counterproductive at the same time to adopt policies designed to promote, and even coerce, those who are bilingual due to their social and cultural circumstances to abandon their native languages.

More than half of the world’s population is bilingual, and there are twice as many bilingual second-language speakers of English as there are native English monolingual speakers.

The people who should be most concerned about learning a “foreign” language are those who speak only English and are losing their competitive edge in the global marketplace because they believe that others must learn their one language rather than taking on the challenge of learning another language.

Jill Kerper Mora

Associate Professor

of Teacher Education

San Diego State University

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“A Language-Challenged U.S.” got it right. Business understands the need for employees to speak many different languages. Linguists know that studying languages shapes our thinking and enhances our insights into new cultures.

In California, 64,000 students speak Vietnamese as their native language, 47,000 students speak Korean, 49,000 speak Mandarin, 16,000 speak Arabic, and 2 million speak Spanish. It wouldn’t take much for these students to become functionally literate in their own language so they could fill the good-paying jobs awaiting them after high school or college.

In a cruel irony, as things now stand, the majority of these students will lose their language by the time they reach middle or high school. What a shame.

We need to modernize our language instruction for all students and see the language diversity in our schools as a valuable resource.

Instead of bemoaning the inability of our schools to produce bilingual and biliterate students from scratch, all we need do is take advantage of the rich language resources we already have in our current student body.

Shelly Spiegel-Coleman

President

Californians Together

Long Beach