Language education benefits all

Hablas español? Or perhaps parlez français? According to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2005 Community Survey, 80.6% of the population over the age of five speaks only English. That's sad, if you ask me, considering that a majority of the other 19.4% are foreign-born. Language is an important skill in an increasingly global world, and assuming that the rest of the world will speak English is just plain lazy. After all, only 4.84% of the world's people speak English as their first language.

In Europe, kids are learning foreign languages at the same time as their times tables. In fact, the European Commission has said that "upon completing initial training, everyone should be proficient in two Community foreign languages." At the lower secondary level, 93% of EU students learn English, 33% learn French and 13% learn German. An even greater percentage of schoolchildren learn English and German in the upper secondary level. So what makes American children exempt from an equivalent multi-lingual education?

According to Francois Thibaud, who runs the Language Workshop for Children in New York, children learn foreign languages best when they are preverbal. "Understanding comes long before speaking, and speaking before reading and writing," he said. "That's the way you learn your own language."

In an ideal world, every American baby would have a bilingual family or baby-sitter or perhaps access to a program like Thibaud's in order to learn an additional language when they were still preverbal. However, this is not that ideal world, and language instruction rarely starts at that age.

I hate to say it, but the alternative for foreign language education is the public school system, which rarely offers language courses before high school, when students are (hopefully) long past the preverbal state of babyhood. High schools usually require two years, if that, of language education to graduate, and students pursuing a college preparatory degree are the only students forced to meet this requirement. Besides, two years is hardly enough time to achieve language proficiency.

Imagine my surprise to discover that President Bush, though arguably less than proficient in English, launched the impressive National Security Language Initiative last year. The initiative has three main goals: to increase the number of foreign language speakers, to increase the number and resources of foreign language teachers and, most importantly, to begin instruction at an earlier age. These goals will require a lot of money from the budget, a proposed $114 million for FY 2007, and I'll believe our government is truly supporting this agenda when I see the results.

Still, it's a great idea, and though it may take awhile for this program to take hold, if it does it will mean a country of multilingual citizens through early language education. In the long term, it could help the government find suitable translators, health workers and to engage with foreign peoples, a skill that the Secretary of State's office calls an "essential component of U.S. national security in the post-9/11 world."

There are other personal advantages for those raised with a multilingual education. Studying a language enables children to practice key skills they will use daily in the real world-speaking, listening, reading and writing. Developing these skills at a young age could be key to the future success of these young scholars, the future of our global world.

Nor do the advantages stop at effective communication skills. Research shows that multilingual students may do better than their peers on standardized tests and possess superior math skills. Apparently, knowing multiple words for one object causes the speaker to treat the object as a symbol, and language becomes mathematical. This mathematical development of the brain seems like a great reason for engineers, computer scientists and others-not just liberal arts majors-to learn a foreign language.

That being said, it seems like American engineers, at least the ones graduating from Tech, are seriously lacking in the language department. Although Tech offers courses in eight languages-Spanish, French, German, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic-only a few Ivan Allen majors require language electives in their degree requirements.

Perhaps this is why the resources of Tech's School of Modern Languages seem insufficient. Many of the teachers are part-time instructors rather than professors, indicating that the department has a shortage of professors that is being addressed with a temporary solution. On the other hand, the fact that we require so many instructors means that students are taking the classes, and that is an encouraging sign, as is the care put into the recent renovation of Swann as a state-of-the-art language education facility.

I took Spanish in high school, and I enjoyed it more than most of my classes. It always came fairly easily to me, and I liked that. Looking back, of course, I realize that's probably because I was taking elementary Spanish and advanced levels of everything else, but let's ignore that small detail.

I took Spanish again at Tech partially because it was a degree requirement and partially because I really wanted to be a proficient Spanish-speaker, since it's essentially the second language of the United States. However, I was sorely disappointed with the instruction I received, though my professors were not at fault.

Though I skipped the 1001 and 1002 courses, I spent the 1101 and 1102 courses reviewing material I had learned in my first couple of years of high school Spanish. Not until 2001 did I get into material that I learned in my third year of high school, and only at the very end of the semester did I learn anything new. Spanish was still the easy A that I had expected it to be, but for all the wrong reasons.

Even if the classes remained on the same elementary level, it would be easy to fix the repetitiveness of the classes. In each course, we used a textbook from a different line of books, which resulted in an overlap of grammar and vocabulary from year to year.

By simply standardizing the textbook used, the Spanish classes would be improved infinitely and students, already behind the rest of the world in language education, could learn so much more.

As for me, I gave up on learning a new language in school. I feel inadequate compared to those like my roommates, a native Chinese-speaker and a native Russian-speaker who are both as fluent in English as I am. I guess that's the price I pay for being American-born. Maybe some day I'll learn another language-hopefully through complete immersion-but until then, I'll keep hoping for a bilingual or multilingual education for America's children.