[EDLING:623] Teaching Italian

[Francis M Hult]

> A washingtonpost.com article

By way of ILR Info

>
>  Arlington Parents Wonder: Why Add Italian Class?
>
>  By Tara Bahrampour
>
>   Since 1988, the last time the Arlington public school system added a
> foreign language to its curriculum, much has changed in the world. The
> Soviet empire collapsed; the Chinese economy soared; a terrorist attack by
> Muslim extremists launched the United States into war and sent the State
> Department in search of more speakers of Middle Eastern and other strategic
> languages.
>
>  That is why some Arlington parents question the school district's recent
> decision to add a course in Italian to its curriculum.
>
>  The class, which will be taught at Wakefield High School starting in the
> fall, was suggested by a Wakefield teacher who is qualified to teach
> Italian. It came about after a survey of 307 parents and 764 students in
> other foreign language classes identified it as something they'd most like
> to see added to the curriculum.
>
>  In the survey, conducted by the district's volunteer Foreign Language
> Advisory Committee, Italian got 21 percent of the vote. Runners-up were
> Arabic and Japanese with 14 percent and Chinese with 12 percent; 17 percent
> said they saw no need for a new language.
>
>  Proponents of Italian say that learning any second language improves a
> student's academic skills. They also point to information supplied by the
> Italian Embassy, as part of a lobbying campaign for teaching Italian in the
> United States, indicating that it is the seventh most-spoken language in
> U.S. homes, that 7,500 U.S. companies do business with Italy and that Italy
> is a world leader in the culinary arts, fashion, furniture design and
> machine tool manufacturing.
>
>  But Peter Rousselot, an Arlington parent and co-chairman of the citizens
> umbrella organization that oversees the foreign language committee, said
> that although he has nothing against the language of Luciano Pavarotti, few
> people speak Italian outside Italy -- even there, the population is
> declining -- and a popularity contest might not be the best way to create a
> new program.
>
>  "The survey results were seized upon by the administration as an indicator
> that lots of families were interested in having Italian," he said.
>
>  But Rousselot said that it's time for the district -- which offers Spanish,
> French, German, Latin and a distance-learning course in Japanese -- to move
> away from a "19th and early 20th century sort of Eurocentric focus" on
> languages when "Arabic and Chinese look like they're going to be languages
> with tremendous strategic importance over the next 50 to 100 years."
>
>  Learning any nonnative language is a good idea, said Dora Johnson of the
> Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics. She added that Italian is
> an official language of the European Union and that it is playing an
> increasingly important role in the world market. "But anybody looking at the
> role of China and saying we shouldn't be teaching lots of our children
> Chinese is crazy."
>
>  According to Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language
> Association of America, current "strategic languages" identified by the
> federal government include Arabic, Pashto, Farsi, Portuguese and Chinese.
>
>  But it isn't easy to teach strategic languages if students aren't
> interested in learning them. "Would I like to see Arabic taught in our
> schools?" asked Mary Ann McCreery, foreign language supervisor for Arlington
> public schools. "Yes, if I thought we could sustain Arabic."
>
>  For now, though, the numbers don't add up. Hiring a teacher and developing
> a curriculum for a single new class costs about $25,000, which might not pay
> off in a relatively small school system, said Mark A. Johnston, assistant
> superintendent of instruction for Arlington public schools.
>
>  Adding Italian at Wakefield will cost less because the person who will
> teach the class already teaches Spanish there, and the class is expected to
> attract enough students to cut back on one Spanish class, according to
> Principal Doris Jackson.
>
>  Jackson said Arabic would be equally popular -- but Johnston and McCreery
> said that even if a qualified teacher could be found, hiring one and
> developing a curriculum would be risky. If students didn't show enough
> interest, beginning students eventually could run out of classmates, and
> their program could be canceled by the time they reach higher levels.
>
>  This happened 17 years ago, when Arlington introduced Japanese classes in
> all four of its high schools; after an initial burst of enthusiasm, McCreery
> said, interest waned and the program was dropped.
>
>  According to Johnson, about 25 U.S.  public schools teach Arabic. Several
> are in the Washington area -- in larger districts with budgets bigger than
> Arlington's. In 1998, after a decade of lobbying by Arab American families,
> Fairfax County became the first in the area to offer Arabic, which is taught
> at Annandale and J.E.B. Stuart high schools and Glasgow Middle School; the
> county also started offering Korean that year and Chinese in 1996.
> Montgomery County started offering Arabic three years ago at Gaithersburg
> High, a "signature school" that students can opt to attend.
>
>  Wakefield's interest in Italian comes in the wake of a lobbying campaign by
> the Italian Embassy and Italian cultural organizations, which made a
> presentation in Arlington three years ago.
>
>  The embassy also lobbied the College Board, which this year for the first
> time will administer an Italian Advanced Placement test. There is a Chinese
> AP test but not one for Arabic.
>
>  School officials said they have not heard similar pitches from the
> embassies of China or Arab countries. Spokesmen at the Saudi and Jordanian
> embassies said they did not know of any programs to promote Arabic in public
> schools. The Chinese Embassy did not respond to a phone message.
>
>  Educators said the less frequently taught languages face a Catch-22:
> Students who aren't exposed to them are unlikely to ask for them, especially
> in the case of Arabic and Chinese, which are considered difficult for
> English speakers.
>
>  "We don't offer it because there's no demand, and there's no demand because
> the schools do not emphasize it," Rousselot said. He added that although he
> is not pushing for Arlington to "spend a million dollars on Arabic," he
> would like to see some "baby steps" in that direction.
>
>  The advisory committee has some ideas on what those steps could be.
>
>  It submitted a report to the Arlington School Board on Thursday that cites
> a finding by the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages that 91
> percent of U.S. foreign-language students study Spanish, French, German or
> Italian, while 9 percent study Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Swahili and "the
> other languages spoken by the overwhelming majority of people around the
> world."
>
>  The committee recommended establishing after-school pilot programs in less
> commonly taught languages at two elementary and two secondary schools at a
> cost of $1,000 per school.
>
>  Karen Audant, chairwoman of the committee and mother of a Key Elementary
> School student, said the committee has been lobbying for less commonly
> taught languages since 2001, and School Board member Elaine S. Furlow said
> she supports efforts to broaden the curriculum.
>
>  "My concern is that we take a leadership role in positioning our kids
> correctly in the world," Furlow said. "We already offer a lot of Romance
> languages, and that's great, but . . . why can't we branch out? It's not
> just the State Department [calling for strategic languages] but also
> companies as they're emerging on the global level."
>
>  For now, Wakefield students are preparing to fill out requests for next
> year's classes. Jackson said at least 15 ninth-graders have shown enthusiasm
> for Italian.
>
>  And perhaps that's only fair. Marty Abbott, director of education at the
> American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, noted that although
> many Americans have Italian ancestry, the United States was not a haven for
> cultural sensitivity when huge waves of Italians were arriving a century
> ago.
>
>  "We were very much in the mode of 'Let's get on with English and get away
> from your country,' " she said, adding that if Hispanics had arrived then,
> Spanish probably wouldn't be so widely spoken now.
>
>  "Italian would be much stronger in this country if the Italians had
> immigrated at a different time," she said. "They are trying to recoup that
> language that they lost."
>
>
>
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