Language Study Shifts (fwd)

[Devin P Browne]

FYI


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 11:59:17 -0400
From: peter brown <brownp at matrix.newpaltz.edu>
Reply-To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum <FLTEACH at UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list FLTEACH <FLTEACH at UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject: Language Study Shifts (fwd)

The New York Times ran a major article last Thursday titled Language Study
Shifts Again: Chinese Is Up, Russian Down" (October 10).



The article presents extensive data with tables and graphs to chart the
development s in two- and four-year colleges around the U.S.

Citing a new study by the MLA, the article mentions the steep decine from
1990-1995 in enrollments in Russian (-45%), German (-28%), French (-25%), as
well as lesser declines in Italian, Latin and Japanese enrollments.

I thought the Times article missed the main story that these numbers are
telling us, namely that the scope of foreign language studies has become
dangerously narrow. My response, slated to appear in tomorrow's paper
(Oct.14), appears below.
Forwarded message:
> From brownp Thu Oct 10 22:34 EDT 1996
> From: peter brown <brownp>
> Message-Id: <199610110233.WAA03529 at matrix.newpaltz.edu>
> Subject: Language Study Shifts
> To: letters at nytimes.com
> Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 22:33:58 -0400 (EDT)
> Cc: brownp (peter brown)
> X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25]
> MIME-Version: 1.0
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>
>       Your piece on "Language Study Shifts Again: Chinese Is Up, Russian
> is Down" (Oct.10) missed the main story that these numbers are telling us.
>
>       The major trend in the U.S. is not toward Chinese or Arabic, which
> gained by only a thousand students nationwide, but toward Spanish, which
> gained 72 times as many students during the same five-year period.
>
>       Contrary to the article's assertion that Spanish accounts for
> "nearly half of the nation's language enrollment of 1.1 million," the
> 606,286 studying Spanish actually comprise more than 55% of the total.
>
>       The situation in New York State is even more lopsided. In the
> state's public schools (K-12), with a substantial Chinese and Arab
> population, the 1995 combined total enrollments for Chinese and Arabic
> amount to less than one percent of what they are for Spanish
>
>       Without making a conscious decision to do so or even realizing it,
> we have allowed years of public neglect and continuing budgetary pressures to
> transform the nation's study of foreign languages into an increasingly
> monolingual pursuit of Spanish.
>
>       Such an over-concentration on one language can only have severely
> negative consequences as we seek to understand, influence, trade and compete
> with countries across the globe whose citizens speak a wide variety of the
> world's major languages.
>
> Peter D.G. Brown
> Professor of German
> State University of New York
> New Paltz. NY 12561
> 914-257-3480
>