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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 9 of 26 10 January 2013 at 5:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
Not just a language but knowing algebra lasts a lifetime too (if you let it be so, that is). As much as I'm a language geek, I have some reservations about taking time away from non-language subjects. I use what I learned in high school math classes a lot more on the job and at home than I do with what I got from my Latin or even French classes. In all cases though, the knowledge is still there. If anything I do think that people (and new graduates) could stand to get a bit more general knowledge acquired from book learning over several years instead of relying that much on sound bites or distortions from Hollywood churning pap that's "inspired by true events" or "based on a true story". It sometimes amazes me at what otherwise educated people don't know from what I've learned as general knowledge (e.g. an acquaintance once let her kettle keep whistling because in her words she wanted the water to be even hotter... *facepalm*, since the water has reached its boiling point, you can't make it hotter unless you just want to make more steam!). Anyway, emk is onto something. In much of the Anglosphere today it's tough to convince the average monoglot here that a foreign language is as worthwhile for study as much as say math or geography. If I were running a school district, I'd put in more schools with immersion if feasible. According to CAL, there are already 544 of these schools with programs in Spanish being the most common. Why teach the language in isolation on the same level as math, history or phys ed? Use that language as the instructional one for other subjects as early as possible. I've also observed that peer pressure tends to keep kids in these immersion programs despite the foreign language. It's hard for kids to leave a class unless they're struggling mightily because many of their friends are also classmates. Moreover several of these friends go back to kindergarten or first grade of an immersion program. As a side benefit, the kids involved get their daily dose of the foreign language. On the other hand, I would not be so keen to set up instruction of foreign languages as elective classes since that depends too much on students'/parents' desire. One year there could be Mandarin classes, but if demographics change, geopolitical/economic perceptions change or students regularly shy away because of the amount of effort needed to acheive a certain minimum grasp compared to that of an "easier" language, then I'd have to come up with a new foreign language elective for next year. I think also that some supporters of increased foreign language instruction in the Anglosphere underestimate the obstacle or mental block in students (and their parents) who know that their native language is the current lingua franca and/or backed by the largest industry for second language instruction. It's just much easier for students outside the Anglosphere to see the value of foreign language instruction because they know and can regularly see that their native language has much less reach beyond their nation's/territory's borders if at any at all. This ultimately leads to the worst of all worlds in the Anglosphere where iffy to bad instruction of foreign language can face off against an unmotivated plurality of students in the class who become even more turned off by learning foreign languages. I wouldn't expect my schools to offer electives in Hungarian, Northern Saami or Slovak any time soon, as much as I'd be bursting with pride in finding enough students who love any of them as much as I do. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6538 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 26 10 January 2013 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Language class in high school is just a mental break in between math and physics. It's only a step above weight lifting class. This was how I experienced language learning in high school.
If foreign languages were taught with high standards like Calculus, everyone but the super students would be getting Ds and Cs. There would be tears. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 26 10 January 2013 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's not quite as simple as that, especially for students who plan on doing manual labor or working with the public, and who live in areas with a large Spanish-speaking population. If you poke around the web, you can find enormous amounts of frustration from monolingual English speakers who just want a job at Burger King (or as a dentist's receptionist), but who aren't qualified because 25% of the paying customers in that neighborhood speak Spanish. The US may be a mostly English-speaking country, but the true language of business is profit. I've seen a very similar phenomenon in Quebec, where tons of monolingual French speakers are bitter because "all the jobs in Montreal require English; it's not even a French city anymore" and the English speakers say, "You can't get a job in this city if you don't speak French." To a certain extent, both groups are right: Your life is going to be a lot easier if you're at least B1 in your second language. Less than 10% of the people I've met are true bilinguals, but almost everybody who works with the public can get by. A mere 320-odd classroom hours is enough to get willing and capable students to B1. That's the equivalent of about 13 weeks of full-time classes spread out across 13 years of school. And in cities like Miami and LA, basic conversational Spanish opens up a lot of jobs, and you can practice it on a regular basis. (This isn't to say that US schools shouldn't aim to teach near-native English to every student. Anything less is brutally unfair to the kids. And I'd love to make a $30 MP3 player and an Assimil book available to every adult who doesn't speak English.) As a pleasant side effect, people are so much nicer to each other when they can all get by in each other's languages. I'm not asking for miracles here, just a reasonable fraction of students who can discuss where to store the new merchandise, tell patients where to find the cafeteria, or apologize for serving the wrong cheeseburger. And if these students ever needed to learn a third language, they'd know how to do it. I really think that the tipping point is near B1. Below that, language classes are basically just regurgitating grammar. Above that, you've got a skill which will get better if you keep using it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6909 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 26 10 January 2013 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Assuming there was a real program, the students were really interested in languages, and the school had unlimited resources, I'd use something like Professor Arguelles' outline HERE.
If I just were in control of the language section, I'd at least make sure that anyone had the opportunity to study French and/or German. And for those who already had either of them (or both), I'd offer another language (Spanish? Arabic? Italian? Russian? Mandarin?) and maybe a classical language such as Latin or Greek. This is more or less the situation at any major high school in Sweden, not that they teach all the languages, but that they have French and German as major languages, and then two or three of the others, plus a classical track with Latin and Greek. Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 11 January 2013 at 12:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 13 of 26 10 January 2013 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
This last line ties in to where I think we agree. The average willingness just is not there to the same degree in the mongolot student in the Anglosphere as it is in the mongolot student outside it. This only compounds the consequences of teaching of dubious quality as it occurs thus turning otherwise capable students into ones who loathe that subject. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Tsopivo Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4471 days ago 258 posts - 411 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Esperanto | Message 14 of 26 10 January 2013 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
In France, pupils learn their FL1 from grade 6 to 12 included and their FL2 from grade 8 to 12 included. The common idea in the population is that foreign language classes should teach you to speak a language fluently but that they don't (people love blaming the school system for being monolingual - It's just as popular as the "I'm just not good at languages" excuse). At the end of high school, most students are not fluent in any foreign language, some are more or less fluent in English (or manage to get there later in their life) and a small proportion has decent skills in 2 languages. A worrying number have lacking skills in French. In that context, I would not want to have FL3, FL4 or FL5 classes (or only optionnal ones for students who do great) and certainly not at the expense of other classes simply because I do not believe they would acquire any useful skill in those (leaving aside the fact that I do not think speaking 4,5 or 6 languages is among the basic things that everyone should be able to do when they leave high school). Changing the paradigms about language classes in the school system for FL1 and FL2 seems far more important in my mind. Edited by Tsopivo on 10 January 2013 at 8:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sipes23 Diglot Senior Member United States pluteopleno.com/wprs Joined 4870 days ago 134 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Persian | Message 15 of 26 11 January 2013 at 2:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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This might be heresy here, but I would almost prefer a basic linguistics class for the vast majority of students.
For the screaming majority of Americans, knowledge of a second language is of limited use. A decent linguistics class may clear up some myths about language (inferiority of non-standard Englishes) and some real understanding of English, which might clear up some writing problems to boot. That said, it would also be remiss to not offer foreign language classes. And I'd guess the classes on tap would, in an ideal world, reflect the current linguistic make up of the community as well as its heritage. As the school gets bigger, I'd add a classical language (Classical Chinese anyone?), a major world language (Arabic and Chinese fall squarely here). I.e. Linguistics, Spanish and Swedish would have been offered at my small-ish high school when I went there. Personally I'd like to see the languages that reflected the community as opposed to the ought-to's. While French is a major world language, there is zero connection between French and the town I grew up in. On the other hand, French might be the choice language to offer in much of northern New England. But none of this will be happen here in the US under the current regime of standardized testing, which steals time away from real education, and arcane certification standards for teachers, which probably keeps qualified teachers out of classrooms (and keeps bad ones in). 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 16 of 26 11 January 2013 at 3:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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I like this idea the more that I think about it.
If high schools have no problem giving introductory classes in geography, biology or economics/personal finance to name a few, then why should linguistics be excluded? The syllabus could be adapted from topics in David Crystal's books (e.g. this one or this one) and like sipes23, I do think that it'd be good for students to realize that linguistics is more than just conjugating Spanish verbs or identifying parts of speech in English class. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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